Sea and sky

The Glorious South

I was pleased to learn that Britain has at last decided to join the European Southern Observatory, giving British astronomers the right to use telescopes in the world's southern hemisphere. I have always vaguely felt that southern skies are more interesting than northern skies, more richly filled with interesting and beautiful objects. In particular, from the south you can see, without making any special effort, two enormous galaxies, the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds. There is none of that patient searching that one must make to find the Andromeda galaxy in the north - especially today with so much light pollution. However, the first Europeans to see the two Magellanic galaxies were not in the best mental state to appreciate their magnificent splendour. They were existing on an unwholesome diet of rotten biscuits and rats, and holding their noses while they swallowed stinking, brackish water.

These were the crewmen of Ferdinand Magellan, the first circumnavigator of the world—after whom, of course, the galaxies were named. These men became, in 1521, the first northeners to enter the Pacific from Cape Horn, crossing, as one of them put it, "a sea so vast that the human mind can scarcely grasp it." Never in history were such tremendous scientific discoveries made in conditions of such horrible discomfort. The voyage, from the southern tip of South America to the Philippines, was carried out in almost absolutely flat calm, which explains the naming of that ocean. As a result it took months, and there must have been many a moment when the crew wished that a violent storm would end their lives. As Magellan's biographer Stefan Zweig described the journey: "Always the same gigantic but empty blueness encompassed the tiny ships, which were the only things that moved amid a changeless world; always the same cruelly glaring daylight, offering the same unchanging prospect; always at night the same cold and silent stars which were fruitlessly searched for their message." Today those stars have yielded many a message. Perhaps the most exciting have been the three secrets of Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbour, that in China was called Nan Mun, or "Gate to the South." The first of these great revelations came in 1689, when Father Richard, a Jesuit comet-hunter in Pondicherry, India, discovered that Alpha Centauri consisted not of one star but two. Then in 1832, a partly blind astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope named Thomas Henderson used parallax to calculate that Alpha Centauri lies 4.3 lightyears from Earth. Before that, no one knew how far away the stars were. And in 1915 came the biggest surprise of all, when Robert Innes, a wine merchant turned astronomer, discovered that Alpha Centauri had a third component, slightly closer to us than the other two. This meant that Alpha was not after all the Sun's nearest neighbour. There was now a new one, appropriately called Proxima Centauri. No doubt many more great discoveries will be made in the south, and it is gratifying that British astronomers will have the chance to make them.