Abstract
DR. BART J. BOK, of Harvard, has made a report (Sky and Telescope, August) on one of the first results of work by the so-called “star-counting circuit”, which is an informal organization of several observatories in the United States ; id other countries. A search was made for comparatively unobscured regions along the Milky Way, and several fields have been discovered in which the light of the distant stars is only slightly dimmed by the absorption of interstellar matter. The most notable clear regions are in the constellations of Cepheus, Auriga, Mono-ceros, Carina and Centaurus. In the portion of the Milky Way which lies between the southern Coalsack and Cygnus, in which the star clouds of Sagittarius and Scutum fall, there are no regions which are relatively unobscured. Even for the brightest patches in this section the light of stars at 3,000 light years from the sun is dimmed by a whole magnitude. It appears that the stars of different spectral classes are not well mixed in our part of the Milky Way. It is remarkable that there is a rapid initial decrease in star densities for all classes in the direction of the galactic nucleus, and at 1,000 light-years from the sun the densities are very low. Higher densities are not found for the central regions until we reach three to five thousand light-years from the sun.
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Distribution of the Stars. Nature 150, 459 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/150459a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/150459a0