Abstract
THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE STARS IN SPACE.—The “Astrophysteal Journal for July contains an important paper by Prof. Kapteyn and P. J. Van Rhijn on stardensity in different regions of the stellar system. The authors have lately accumulated from various sources much new material on star parallaxes and motions and state that they could not resist the temptation to attempt a general solution of the problem of the universe, though they admit that it will need revision. They adopt the parsec as unit of distance, and the magnitude at unit distance as absolute magnitude. That of the sun is —02, while the median magnitude of all stars is + 2.7. The expression for the logarithm of the number of stars of absolute magnitude M per 1000 cubic parsecs in the region near the sun is found to be — 2.394 + 0.1858 M—0.0345 M2, indicating a parabolic curve when M is taken as abscissa. This gives 0.0451 stars per cubic parsec near the sun, or 23.6 within 5 parsecs of the sun. Observation gives some twenty-seven stars in this sphere—a satisfactory agreement.
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Our Astronomical Column. Nature 106, 356 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/106356a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/106356a0