The Donaldsonville Chief

Extraordinary news has come from the stars. Dr. Huggins, the eminent English spectroscopist, by uniting spectroscopic appliances with a telescope which has been placed at his disposal by the Royal Astronomical Society, in London, has made remarkable discoveries. He finds that many of the stars are traveling far more swiftly than has been supposed. Sirius is receding from the earth at a rate exceeding twenty miles a second. Arcturus is traveling toward us at a rate of some fifty miles a second. Dr. Huggins can trace a tendency among the stars in one part of the heavens to approach the earth, while the stars in the opposite part of the heavens are receding from us; and the stars which are approaching lie on that side of the heavens towards which Herschel long since taught us that the sun is traveling. But there are stars not obeying this simple law; and among these Dr. Huggins recognizes instances of that community of motion to which a modern student of the stars has given the name of star-drift. It happens that one of the most remarkable instances relates to five well-known stars known to astronomers as Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon and Zeta, of the Great Bear, all of which are drifting bodily through space, and receding from the earth at the rate of about thirty miles per second.