But at least fifteen times in the course of recorded history men
looking out from the earth have beheld in the remote depths of space
great outbursts of fiery light, some of them more splendidly luminous
than anything else in the firmament except the sun! If they were
conflagrations, how many million worlds like ours were required to
feed their blaze?
It is probable that ``temporary'' or ``new'' stars, as these wonderful
apparitions are called, really are conflagrations; not in the sense of
a bonfire or a burning house or city, but in that of a sudden eruption
of inconceivable heat and light, such as would result from the
stripping off the shell of an encrusted sun or the crashing together
of two mighty orbs flying through space with a hundred times the
velocity of the swiftest cannon-shot.
Temporary stars are the rarest and most erratic of astronomical
phenomena. The earliest records relating to them are not very clear,
and we cannot in every instance be certain that it was one of these
appearances that the ignorant and superstitious old chroniclers are
trying to describe. The first temporary star that we are absolutely
sure of appeared in 1572, and is known as ``Tycho's Star,'' because
the celebrated Danish astronomer (whose remains, with his
gold-and-silver artificial nose -- made necessary by a duel -- still
intact, were disinterred and reburied in 1901) was the first to
perceive it in the sky, and the most assiduous and successful in his
studies of it.
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