Space - Tullamore Astronomical Society

One would expect one or some of the stars to be
masked by the Sun as it is a very massive star, as the
solar eclipse revealed the Hyades cluster in the
temporary night in the daylight at the moment of the
solar eclipse. The sun in fact appeared to sit along beside
them in the sky and caused the apparent position of a
few of them to shift a bit.
Eddington exposed photographic plates to record the
eclipse and reveal that the stars of the cluster were not
masked by the Suns mass, but the light from them was
bent or curved by the Suns mass and gravitational field
and continued to shine down on the earth, and appear on
the developed plates.
As light from Stars is coming from a very great
distance, it takes many thousands of years and light
years to travel to our eyes or to Eddington's photographic
plates.
The fact that the stars concerned appeared on his
photographic plates and were not masked by the Sun,
therefore Eddington proved this prediction of Einstein
correct.
Because the light from a star is travelling
through time and space - when it bends around a large
mass like the Sun - therefore time and space are
temporally bent or curved or misshapen. This effect
occurs close to the Sun at the 96 million mile mark and it
is then the kink happens. The apparent displacement of
light results from the warping of space in the vicinity of
the massive object through which light travels. The light
never changes course, but merely follows the curvature
of space. Astronomers now refer to this displacement of
light as gravitational lensing.
According to Professor Brunell, Eddington was
a wonderful communicator of science theory and was at
the forefront of popularising Einstein’s work. There
were few people in the world at the time that could
understand the theory of Relativity yet alone explain it.
A poster at the time announcing on of his talks on the
subject claimed it was “A Book for 12 Wise Men”
Arthur Stanly Eddington made Albert Einstein’s work
popular and famous by his understanding and his desire
to qualify Einstein’s theory for general consumption.
Professor Jocelyn Bell Brunell in her lecture on
September 8th 2005 continued that wonderful
achievement of clear communication for both Albert
Einstein and Arthur Eddington.
In his honour several items have been named after
Eddington. The Eddington crater on the moon is the
remains of a lava flooded lunar impact crater, it is on the
western edge of Oceanus Procellarum. To the west is the
Struve walled plain to the east/southeast is the prominent
Seleucus crater and south of Eddington is Krafft crater.
In physics the Eddington Limit is a natural limit to the
luminosity of a star. It is a way of describing the density
of luminous intensity in a direction from the star, in
relation to how much more the object radiates energy
compared to our Sun.
Accretion is an increase in size by the gradual addition
of smaller parts, and in astronomy is a description of a
gravitational process by which bodies like planets and
stars form from gas and dust.
The European Space Agency
had a comprehensive plan for
The Eddington Space
Telescope, which would have
been a very sensitive device
for mapping the evolution of
stars. It was to be launched in
2008, the decision was taken
to cancel the Eddington mission but several of its science
packages will it is hoped make their way onto other
missions to search for other habitable planets and to
study the stars of our universe.
On enquiring with The European Space Agency about
the Eddington Mission this was the reply
“Many thanks for your email enquiry concerning the
Eddington
Mission. As things currently stand the Eddington
mission is cancelled, although it is possible that the
mission could resurface at some point in the future There
is a PDF document to be found by following this link
that outline the scope of the Eddington mission”
http://sci.esa.int/sciencee/www/object/doc.cfm?fobjectid=35806
I would like to acknowledge and thank Professor Jocelyn
Bell Brunell, for her kind advice and support in the
development of this article.
-Deirdre Kelleghan.
Réalta – Volume 7, Issue 2 – November/December 2005 – Tullamore Astronomical Society 15