One of the great difficulties in astrophysics is that we have such a short time-span of observation. Even the ephemeral stars—the super-giants that last only a million years or so—last far longer than human history. But it may be that some phenomena have been observed and misunderstood.
ROBERT S. RICHARDSON
Anyone who knows the stars at all must be familiar with Sirius the Dog Star. Sirius is the brightest star in the sky. On clear frosty winter evenings we see Sirius in the south sparkling like a diamond. That out-worn phrase "sparkling like a diamond" best expresses my feelings about Sirius. To me Sirius looks exactly like a beautiful blue-white diamond.
But suppose I told you that to me Sirius looks like a beautiful blood-red ruby sparkling in the southern sky? You would think I was either crazy or ought to have my eyes examined. Yet, if we are to believe the record, that is the way Sirius looked to Claudius Ptolemy, one of the most famous astronomers of antiquity. For here is Ptolemy's own description of Sirius, in his great work the "Almagest" published about A.D. 140. (Almagest" in Arabic means "The Greatest.")
"The brightest and red star in the face called the Dog." The italics are mine.
In those days when mirrors were not so common the stars of Canis Major, Orion, and Canis Minor, were probably more familiar to Ptolemy than the sight of his own face. Then why did he call Sirius red when plainly it is white? That is our question.
The Easy Answers
The easiest explanation is that Ptolemy had some abnormality of vision so that white stars appeared to him as red. But such an explanation won't stand up for a minute. For in that case he would have listed all the other white stars in his catalog as red. Now, if a star was white, the old astronomers never mentioned its color. (Incidentally "old" depends upon when you were flourishing. Ptolemy in "Almagest" often refers to "observations by the 'ancients' ".) The bright stars Rigel and Betelgeuse near Sirius provide us with an excellent check. Ptolemy describes the red super-giant Betelgeuse (spectral class M2, Iab) as "The bright red star in the right shoulder"; and the supergiant white Rigel (spectral class B8, Ia) as "The bright star in the left foot common with the water." The "water" here refers to the water in the constellation of Eridanus the River. Neither does he mention the color of other bright white stars such as Vega, Altair, Regulus, and Procyon. But he describes Arcturus as "fiery" and Antares as "red." Hence there seems to be no evidence that Ptolemy's vision was abnormally color sensitive.
It is rather puzzling that he speaks of Pollux as "The red star in the head of the eastern Twin." Today I think we would call Pollux, or Beta Geminorum, spectral class KO III, white or yellowish white.
"But I've seen Sirius when it did look red!" you will protest.
Well, so have I, many times. In fact, I've seen Sirius flashing every color of the rainbow. And I'm not an anomalous trichromat either. I've had my eyes tested by an expert in that field.
The rainbow colors flashing from Sirius are also easily explained away. The atmosphere acts on light rays passing through it like a prism. The air bends the colors by increasing amounts from the longest visible red rays, through progressively shorter wavelengths orange, yellow, green, blue, to violet. Thus in traversing the atmosphere the colors in a white beam of starlight are spread apart or dispersed. The prismatic effect of the atmosphere is most noticeable when Sirius is near the horizon, rising or setting, so that its light reaches us through the longest air path. The rainbow colors we see flashing from Sirius when low in the sky arise simply from the atmospheric spectrum of the star. Similar color effects may be observed in other bright stars.
If Ptolemy had done his observing from some station in the far north where Sirius was always skirting along the horizon, we might understand why he called it red. But from what little we know of him he did all his observing in and around Alexandria in latitude 31 degrees north. Alexandria is about 9 degrees nearer the equator than the average latitude of the United States. Hence Ptolemy was better situated for observing Sirius than ourselves. That is, Sirius would have been generally higher in his sky than in ours, and the prismatic dispersion of the atmosphere on its rays less conspicuous.
Sirius to Other Observers
In 1543 the Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, published a book entitled "On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres," in which he advanced some rather disturbing ideas on the motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets. His "De Revolutionibus," as it is generally known, also contained a revision of Ptolemy's old star catalog. (Which Ptolemy, in turn, got mostly from Hipparchus's catalog some three centuries earlier.) And Copernicus says nothing about Sirius being red. "The very bright star called Canis, in the mouth," is the way he puts it. Copernicus did his observing from Cracow in latitude 50 degrees north, a station much less favorably located for observing the southern stars than Alexandria. (There is a story, probably erroneous, that Copernicus in his whole life never saw the planet Mercury.)
What we would like very much to know is how Sirius looked to observers before Ptolemy. Reliable evidence is naturally harder to come by the farther we dig back in the archives. But the questions raised by Ptolemy's red Sirius have such profound implications for stellar evolution that chronologists have sifted every scrap of information bearing on the subject.
The clearest statement relating to the color of Sirius occurs in a fragment from the writings of Lucius Seneca about a century before Ptolemy. He remarks that the "redness of the Dog Star is deeper, that of Mars milder, that of Jupiter nothing at all, the splendor being turned to pure light." Still earlier we find references to the reddish color of Sirius among writings of the Egyptians and Assyrians.
The earliest evidence of Sirius not red comes from the Persian astronomer, Abderrahman Al-Sufi, A.D. 903-986, a careful observer whose stellar magnitudes were often used in preference to Ptolemy's. Al-Sufi says nothing about the color of Sirius, but simply omits it from his list of colored stars. If such a bright star had displayed so much as a hint of red or orange, it surely could not have escaped his notice.
We may assume on tolerably reliable evidence, therefore, that from about A.D. 200, and for a short time previous, Sirius was not white but red. What do we mean by a "short time?" We were hoping you wouldn't ask that question. Astronomically speaking, I suppose, any major change in a star in less than a thousand years might be characterized as "short," not to say "catastrophic."
Having disposed, we hope, of the easy explanations of a red Sirius, let us now start probing deeper.
What Do You Mean by "Bright"?
In what follows we shall be continually talking about the brightness of this object and that. Today we are not supposed to learn about things by studying them in books. We are supposed to learn about them by marching from Berkeley, to Oakland, for instance, although God knows why anybody in his right mind would want to walk to Oakland. Well, I seriously doubt if you can learn about stellar magnitudes that way.
Determining an accurate scale of stellar magnitudes has been a headache to astronomers for over a hundred years. I have never had occasion to work in this field, but I believe the photometric men now have their scale of magnitudes for the stars firmly established. I would be willing to bet, however, that their magnitude scale still will require working over when they begin taking observations from large Moon-based telescopes. Our atmosphere is such a complicating obstacle in magnitude determinations.
Ptolemy put fifteen of the brightest stars visible to him from Alexandria into magnitude 1, and the faintest he could see into magnitude 6. It is a little surprising that Ptolemy put four stars that most of us would call magnitude 1—Altair, Pollux, Antares, and Castor—into magnitude 2. Stars of intermediate brightness such as the five brightest in the Big Bear were magnitude 2; other fainter stars of the various constellations went into groups 3, 4, and 5. Astronomers for centuries were tremendously concerned with the location of the stars in the mythological figures outlining the sea monsters, giants, chained maidens, and other assorted celestial characters. Thus as nearly as I can identify them, Zeta Virginis is "The star under the girdle on the right buttock of the Virgin," Alpheratz, or Alpha Andromedae, is "The star common to the Horse's navel and Andromeda's head," et cetera. Modern astronomers would not have the foggiest notion of the anatomy of stellar positions.
The stellar magnitude scale may be confusing to you at first in that the stars get fainter as their magnitudes get larger. You can fix the idea by thinking of your strength getting feebler as your age gets larger.
You might suppose that a second magnitude star was one-half as bright as a first magnitude star; a third magnitude star one-third as bright; a sixth magnitude star one-sixth as bright, and so on. But the magnitude scale merely expresses how bright the different stars look. If you made measures on their light intensity with a photometer, you would find their brightness changes in quite a different way. You would find that a difference on 1 in magnitude between stars corresponds to a ratio of about 2.5 in luminosity. Astronomers finally agreed to make this ratio 2.512 exactly. This peculiar number 2.512 makes a first magnitude star just 100 times as bright as a sixth magnitude star. As you have probably already guessed, 2.512 is the 5th root of 100. So a first magnitude star is 2.512 times as bright as a second magnitude star; 2.512 X 2.512 or 6.30 times as bright as a third magnitude star, and so on.
The magnitude scale is naturally not restricted merely to the stars you can see, but extends indefinitely in either direction to fainter and brighter objects. Fainter objects have larger and larger positive magnitudes. Brighter objects have fractional and negative magnitudes. In Table I we have listed various celestial objects relative to the brightness of the seven familiar stars on the Big Dipper which we shall assume have an average magnitude of 2.0.
Apparent Vs. Absolute
Perhaps you have got a bit tired about our continual harping on apparent magnitudes and apparent luminosities. But there was a reason. The figures in Table I merely tell you is how bright these objects LOOK, not how bright they ARE. Naturally we can't say anything about their real, or absolute brightness, until we know their distances. Often we don't know their distances. For example, we don't know the distances of all the myriad stars at the photographic limit of the 200-inch Hale telescope.
Now IF the stars were all at the SAME distance we could tell their absolute magnitudes at a glance. But if we know their distance and have measured their apparent magnitude we can immediately calculate their absolute magnitude at some arbitrary standard distance. Astronomers have found it convenient to make 10 parsecs their standard of distance. The parsec is the unit of distance used almost exclusively among astronomers. It is the distance of a star whose parallax is one second of arc. The system of Alpha Centauri comes closest to this idea with a parallax of 3/4 seconds of arc, corresponding to a distance of 1.31 parsecs. In terms of the more popular light-year the distance of Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light-years, which is 25 million million miles.
Listing objects according to absolute magnitude forces us to do some radical rearranging in our concept of relative brightness, as shown in Table 11. You see that many objects which loom very bright in our sky are actually rather faint, whereas others are way up in the hierarchy of luminosity.
You may be wondering why we bother to list an object's brightness according to magnitudes? Why don't we list it directly according to its real or apparent luminosity? Wouldn't it be a lot simpler that way?
Yes, I suppose it would be simpler. Then why don't we do it? Well, as women would say, "Just because." Which isn't such a foolish answer sometimes when you think about it. In this case, the reason is because our psychophysical system doesn't work that way. Because for some reason the intensity with which we perceive a stimulus is proportional—not directly to the stimulus—but to the logarithm of the stimulus. (The Weber-Fechner law of sensation.)
The Weber-Fechner law may be of some consolation the next time you go to the dentist. Let us say the pain inflicted on one of your teeth today corresponds to a stimulus of 10. The dentist warns you that next time the pain inflicted will correspond to a stimulus of 100. But it won't feel 10 times as painful. It will feel only twice as painful. (The logarithm of 10 is 1, the logarithm of 100 is 2.) So far as I am aware nobody knows why we respond to stimuli this way.
Story idea!
Could life exist on a world whose inhabitants experience pain directly? Would not such creatures be too sensitive to stimuli to survive for long?
Sirius and Stellar Evolution
Can the theory of stellar evolution enable us to account for a red Sirius? Well . . . yes and no.
Astronomers right now are riding high on the idea that stars are formed by condensation from atoms and clouds of dust in interstellar space. They believe there is probably more matter between the stars of our galaxy than in the stars. Herschel's "Loch im Himmel," far from being holes in the heavens, are rather vast obscuring clouds that become apparent when they blot out dense star clouds behind them.
In such relatively congested regions of space, condensations must inevitably occur and become centers of attraction for surrounding material. These centers grow and ultimately develop into huge extended globular masses. Whether such spheres justify the name "stars" or not is a matter of definition, for certainly they do not shine. "Proto-stars" is the name generally applied.
As the mass contracts it eventually reaches a stage when the temperature at its center becomes high enough for nuclear reactions to start. Here we are not concerned with the details and manifold probabilities of the various possible reactions. Essentially they consist of the conversion of hydrogen into helium. As a star's hydrogen is consumed it contracts, its central temperature rises, and the star grows hotter and whiter.
Eventually a star reaches a comfortable state when it is able to derive its necessary energy from nuclear reactions rather than gravitational attraction. The star has now reached the point in its evolutionary career called "age zero." (In somewhat the same way that all racehorses become one-year-old on New Year's Day.) A star that shines by consuming its hydrogen is said to be on the "main sequence." The vast mass of stars are on the thickly populated main sequence. On the main sequence we find white stars of moderately high luminosity such as Altair and Fomalhaut, yellow stars like Pollux and the Sun, down to such faint red bodies as Wolf 359, Epsilon Indi, and BD-F5°1668.
There is a temptation to draw an analogy between stars on the main sequence and stars of the stage who have arrived on Broadway. But such an analogy would be highly misleading. A star on the main sequence is in a stable secure state where it may continue shining serenely for hundreds of millions of years. But as an actress who ought to know once told me, "There is no such thing as security on the stage."
When the Hydrogen Begins to Fail
As with all good things, inevitably there comes a time when a star's supply of viable hydrogen approaches exhaustion. What to do? If the star intends to continue shining, it has no other choice but to fall back again on gravitational attraction. (We hope cosmologists won't castigate us too bitterly for anthropomorphizing the orbs of heaven this way. Sir Arthur S. Eddington used to be almost as bad in some of his writing.) The theoretical men tell us that a star contracting at this stage behaves in quite a different way than you might anticipate. Instead of becoming smaller and denser the star becomes larger and thinner. Contraction now produces such a rapid increase in temperature in the central core that new nuclear reactions start functioning. The result is the star balloons out enormously, so that despite its high central temperature, its outer layers become excessively rarified and cool. The resulting huge distended objects are appropriately called "red giants," or, if exceedingly luminous, "red supergiants." There are reasons for believing that all the heavy elements may be formed in the cores of the red giants. Aldebaran is a red giant; Antares, Betelgeuse, and Mira examples of red supergiants.
What Fate Red Giants?
What happens to a red giant when the energy from all its energy sources faces depletion?
That is hard to say. Presumably it starts contracting again. Possibly it becomes unstable turning into some sort of variable, or even a nova. Finally when BOTH nuclear and gravitational energy sources are virtually exhausted it settles down into its senile old age as a white dwarf, a body no bigger than a planet radiating so feebly in this senescent condition as to remain luminous for billions of years. Finally it reaches complete extinction as a black dwarf. It is doubtful if our galaxy is old enough to contain any black dwarfs. If so, they would certainly be difficult objects to uncover.
Fig. 1. Relative sizes of representative stars and approximate masses. From "A Brief Text in Astronomy,"
by Skilling and Richardson, Revised, Holt-Dryden, 1959.
How fast a star evolves depends in a very critical way upon its mass. The larger the mass of a star the faster its rate of evolution. A brilliant white supergiant of mass 25 suns is consuming hydrogen at such a profligate rate it may last for only a couple of million years.
A sedate yellow dwarf like the Sun ought to be good for several billion years or more. A faint red dwarf of 0.8 solar masses for twice as long. We see that slight differences in mass among the stars can be of critical importance in determining their lifetimes. (Fig. 1)
Application to the Sirius System
Suppose that originally the Sirius system consisted of the two stars, A and B, A being the moderately bright white star we know now, but B being quite a different type of object. B was the object that evolved into the present white dwarf companion of A. Now B presumably evolved considerably faster than A. Hence originally B must have been considerably the more massive of the two. While star A was shining at essentially its present rate on the main sequence, B underwent a sudden metamorphosis into a red giant. While we're supposing, let's make Sirius B evolve rapidly into a luminous red supergiant of absolute magnitude —5.5.
How bright would the Sirius system have loomed in our night sky if composed of a supergiant of absolute magnitude —5.5 and a bright dwarf of absolute magnitude +1.4? Now the Sirius system is the fifth nearest the Earth, distant only 8.7 light years. Such a red super-giant Sirius would be a conspicuous object indeed, far outshining every celestial object except the Sun and Moon. With an apparent magnitude of —8.4, it would be 48 times as bright as Venus at maximum brilliancy and 620 times brighter than Sirius appears to us now. No nova within historical times has ever been nearly so bright, not even Tycho's nova of 1572 or the one in the Crab nebula of 1054. It is inconceivable that any object so bright that it cast a shadow at night and was easily visible in broad daylight could have passed unnoticed. Yet among ninety ancient novae recorded in China, Japan, and Korea, from the Fourteenth Century B.C. to A.D. 1690, there is not one that appeared near the Dog Star.
Let us be more realistic and make Sirius B a "normal" red giant like Aldebaran of absolute magnitude —0.2. Aldebaran combined with the present bright white star would give us an orange star of absolute magnitude —0.42. Such a stellar system would still produce a very bright object of apparent magnitude —3.3, outshining Venus except near maximum brilliancy.
We see that stellar evolution, assuming Sirius B as a former red giant, seems to provide us with a satisfactory explanation for Ptolemy's bright red star in the face of the Dog.
Not so!
For the assumptions we have been forced to make immediately involve us in even worse difficulties!
Reducing Aids
In the Sirius system now we have a bright white star of mass 2.4 Suns and a white dwarf of mass 0.96 Suns. (Hereafter we shall use the symbol 0 for the Sun.) The respective masses off the two components are very accurately known. The mass of Aldebaran is 4 0.
Now originally Sirius B of necessity must have been more massive than Sirius A, since to reach its present white dwarf stage it had to evolve faster. But, if originally of mass 4 0 like Aldebaran, it had perforce to get rid of at least 3 0 s somewhere along the route, and get rid of them in a hurry, too.
Our first thought is of a nova outburst. We know that novae eject luminous shells with high velocity.
Half a century or so ago such a hypothesis would have seemed quite plausible. But today the nova outburst is regarded as a superficial phenomenon, a mere stellar "skin disease." From energy considerations the nova explosion, despite its spectacular appearance, is believed to involve scarcely as much as 1/100th of the Sun's mass. (Here we are talking about normal novae; supernovae are something else.)
But it seems to be possible for stars to lose mass continuously without going through the catastrophic nova process. Such a star is Alpha Herculis, a triple system consisting of a red giant and a faint companion which itself is a double. The whole system is enveloped in a cloud expanding at 22,000 miles per hour. It is estimated to be losing mass at the rate of one-millionth Suns per century. Which is much too slow to be of help to us in the Sirius system.
Thus again we are brought to a full stop. Cast about as we will we cannot explain a red Sirius.
Surrogate?
The fact that we can't explain something doesn't necessarily mean that it can't happen—an elementary fact we often overlook. Let us now make a rapid shift in our line of argument.
The Wonder Star in the South
In November, 1676, Edmund Halley, then age twenty-one, set sail for St. Helena, the same desolate little isle in the south Atlantic where Napoleon was to be banished one hundred thirty-nine years later. Halley, however, made the trip voluntarily for the purpose of observing the transit of Mercury over the Sun's disk on November 7, 1677 N.S. Halley, in a sense, was a college dropout, in that he left Oxford before obtaining his degree. Besides observing the transit, he also planned to make pendulum measures on gravity at this isolated station, as well as mapping the stars in the southern heavens invisible, or only visible with difficulty, from Europe.
Fig. 2. Position of Eta Carinae (formerly Eta Argos) indicated by arrow is: Right Ascension 10' 43'.0
Declination —59° 25'
Epoch 1950.0
Eta Carinae is about 7th magnitude, too faint to be seen without field glasses.
Halley's return to England was a triumph. By official proclamation, Charles II ordered that he be granted a degree from Oxford, said degree to be granted without examination. Imagine the commotion such a proclamation would arouse today.
Halley was no dry-as-dust scientist viewing the world from the isolation of his ivory tower. (Incidentally, although I've been personally acquainted with hundreds of scientists, I have yet to meet one who dwelt in an ivory tower. Does anyone know where this much overworked expression originated?) Halley was very socially minded, as much at home mingling with the dubious characters at the court of Charles II as in presiding over the meetings of the Royal Society. I've often wondered if he ever danced with Nel Gwyn.
In Halley's survey of the southern heavens, he found a 4th magnitude star in the constellation of Argo Navis, the Ship of the Argonauts, which was not recorded in Ptolemy's "Almagest." He suspected the star of being variable and thought possibly it might have been too faint to have been recorded by Ptolemy. Halley designated the star Eta Argos, and so it remained until 1930, I believe, when this huge sprawling constellation was divided into Carina (the Keel), Puppis (the Poop), and Vela (the sails), of the ship Argo. Here we shall refer to this star by its current name at the time when observed. (Fig. 2)
It is perhaps significant that Halley was not above playing a little politics in his star gazing. He thoughtfully introduced a brand-new constellation into the southern heavens which he named Robur Carolinum, after his patron Charles II. Needless to say, Robur Carolinum met with scant favor outside the British Isles. Today you will search the southern heavens in vain for Robur Carolinum.
We hear no more of Eta Argos until 1751 when it was reported as magnitude 2. In 1827 the English botanist, Burchell, found it to be 1st magnitude, fully as bright as Alpha Crucis, the brightest star in the nearby Southern Cross.
Sir John Herschel, some ten years later, while observing at the Cape of Good Hope, remarked that Eta Argos was variable between the 1st and 2nd magnitudes. Apparently its variability was not sufficiently striking to cause him to suspect it as being an especially abnormal object. But on December 16, 1837, he writes that his "astonishment was excited by the appearance of a new candidate for distinction among the very brightest stars of the first magnitude, in a part of the heavens with which being perfectly familiar, I was certain that no such brilliant object had been seen before. After momentary hesitation . . . I became satisfied of its identity with my old acquaintance Eta Argos."
The greatest flare-up of Eta Argos occurred in April 1843, when it rose to magnitude —1.0, on the modern scale of magnitudes. Its brightness was then exceeded by no other star in the sky with the single exception of Sirius. It soon began to fade and by 1870 had fallen below naked-eye visibility to magnitude 7, where it still remains unless it has undergone a recent upsurge. The numerous fluctuations in the magnitude of this remarkable object up to 1952 are shown in Fig. 3.
Unfortunately for the numerous amateur variable star observers in this country, Eta Carinae, as we shall call it now, is barely visible from Florida, Hawaii, and the Texas Panhandle. It gets above the southern horizon briefly at midnight around March 1st, and four minutes earlier each succeeding night thereafter. To identify Eta Argos you will need a star map and binoculars.
Fig. 3. The variations in the apparent visual magnitude of Eta Carinae from 1800 to about 1952. In 1843, Eta Carinae reached its greatest known brightness of —1, when it outshone every star except Sirius. "The Wonder Star Eta Carinae," by G. De Vaucouleurs, Courtesy Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
" . . . some unknown physical process . .
A noted astronomer has called Eta Carinae "one of the most perplexing stars in the heavens." It is impossible to pigeonhole it among any of the numerous variables. Probably it is best described as an "abnormally slow nova." Several times close companions have been detected around it, but it is believed they are not diminutive dwarf stars but more likely gaseous condensations ejected with high velocity.
Combining the spectroscopic radial velocities of these companions with their angular separation from the star, we can make an estimate of the distance of Eta Carinae-3,900 light-years. Only an exceedingly luminous star could attain apparent magnitude —1.0 at so great a distance: Deneb at 1,400 light-years is of apparent magnitude +1.26, and Rigel at 800 light-years appears as magnitude +0.14. If Eta Carinae was of magnitude —1.0 in 1843, it must have had an absolute magnitude of — 11 .4, almost luminous enough to make a "dwarf supernova" out of it, if we may be permitted such a term. Even now at apparent magnitude +7, it has an absolute magnitude of —3.4, about the same as the highly luminous Spica.
And It's Red!
The best part about Eta Carinae as a surrogate, or stand-in, for Sirius B is its reddish color, which has persisted to the present day. This fiery tint was especially noticeable at the great maximum of 1843, when its color was likened to that of Arcturus and Aldebaran. Spectrograms show this red color comes from intense emission in the red H alpha line of glowing hydrogen. Recently the discovery of powerful infrared emission in Eta Carinae has led to a strong suspicion that some unknown physical process is taking place.
Now, if Eta Carinae would only be obliging enough to do a quick changeover into a white dwarf, our case would be complete. Of course, the mere fact that we know of one star which satisfies our principal requirements for Ptolemy's red Sirius doesn't prove a thing. All it does is make the situation seem less hopeless.
Fig. 4. If Sirius were an isolated star it would move in the straight line indicated by the arrow. Instead if was
found to be moving in the sinuous line shown by the heavy curve. Faint companion is blotted out when close to bright
star as in 1940. Companion was well situated for observation in 1970, as they were near maximum separation.
From "A Brief Test in Astronomy," by Skilling and Richardson, Holt-Dryden, 1959.
A Suggestion from the "Spook Sonata"
Here is a little contribution of my own to this much debated subject.
In August Strindberg's play "The Ghost Sonata," Scene 3, he gives the character, the Student, the following line:
"But the largest and most beautiful of all the stars in the firmament, the golden-red Sirius, is the narcissus with its gold and red chalice and its six white rays."
Evidently Sirius looked the same to Strindberg as it did to Ptolemy!
Strindberg is considered the greatest writer that Sweden has yet produced. His "Spoksonaten," written in 1907, is generally regarded as the best Chamber Play written for his own intimate theater.
Strindberg, like most great creative geniuses, was dead broke and half-crazy during most of his writing career. Artists often are prone to speak of their blue-green period, but from about 1894 to 1898 Strindberg went through what he described as his "Inferno Period." Psychoanalysts would probably have classified him as a paranoid schizophrenic. He was an avowed misogamist who publicly denounced the new emancipated "Ibsen" women who were beginning to rear their ugly heads in Europe late in the last century. So he proceeded to marry three such females with shattering consequences to all concerned.
Strindberg was intensely interested in science, and for some ten years carried on intensive experiments trying to convert sulfur into gold, an occupation which his second wife regarded with no enthusiasm whatever. For a while he almost convinced himself he should abandon creative writing to devote himself entirely to alchemy.
Whether crazy nor not, however, I find it hard to understand why Strindberg called Sirius "golden-red." Like most writers, he stored up every scrap of experience that might conceivably be useful to him. And almost invariably it did prove useful. Strindberg never wasted anything. I firmly believe that Strindberg called Sirius "golden-red" because that was the way this star looked to him.
WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW IS WHETHER THERE
ARE OTHER PEOPLE TO WHOM SIRIUS LOOKS RED? Readers of this magazine, for instance. No cheating or fabrications, please.
The Future
That Sirius must have a faint companion pulling it out of its straight-line path was predicted mathematically by Bessel in 1843, from the sinuous course of the bright star (Fig. 4). This faint companion was sighted by the Alvin Clarks in 1862, who were not looking for it at the time, but engaged in testing a new telescope lens. But its amazing character as a small white star was not revealed until 1915 by W. S. Adams at Mount Wilson. Its composition of inconceivably high-density "degenerate" matter was established from the quantum theory about 1925.
Does the system of Sirius hold other revelations for us? It would not be too surprising. Three experienced double-star observers have reported seeing the companion itself as double; indeed, one claimed he saw it "persistently" double. Who knows what we may find in the Sirius system when we can examine it with powerful Moon-based telescopes, free from the agitation and diffusion of light that makes the image such a difficult object for investigation even under the most favorable conditions in our present terrestrial instruments?