Huggins, Maxwell, 1868 //Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 158 (1868)

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My friend, Dr. William Allen Miller, visited the observatory on this evening, and kindly took part in the following observations.

The general arrangement of the apparatus with which the comparison was made is shown in the following diagram.

A glass bottle converted into a gas-holder, a, contained the olefiant gas. This was connected by means of a flexible tube, with a glass tube b, into which were soldered two platinum wires. The part of the tube in front of the points of the wires had been cut away, and the surfaces carefully ground. A small plate of glass closed the opening by being held in its place by a band of vulcanized india-rubber. This tube was arranged in its proper

position before the small mirror of the spectroscope c, by which the light of the spark was reflected into the instrument, and its spectrum was seen immediately beneath the spectrum of the comet. The spectroscope employed was furnished with two prisms of 60°.

The brightest end of the middle band of the cometic spectrum was seen to be coincident with the commencement of the corresponding band in the spectrum of the spark. As this limit of the band was well defined in both spectra, the coincidence could be satisfactorily observed up to the power of the spectroscope; and may be considered to be determined within about the distance which separates the components of the double line D. As the limits of the other bands were less distinctly seen, the same amount of certainty of mdccclxviii. 4 H

exact coincidence could not be obtained. We considered these bands to agree precisely in position with the bands corresponding to them in the spectrum of the spark.

The apparent identity of the spectrum of the comet with that of carbon rests not only on the coincidence of position in the spectrum of the bands, but also upon the very remarkable resemblance of the corresponding bands in their general characters, and in their relative brightness. This is very noticeable in the middle band, where the gradation of brightness is not uniform. This band in both spectra remained of nearly equal brightness for the same proportion of its length.

On a subsequent evening, June 25, I repeated these comparisons, when the former observations were fully confirmed in every particular. On this evening I compared the brightest band with that of carbon in the larger spectroscope, which gives a dispersion of about five prisms.

The remarkably close resemblance of the spectrum of the comet to the spectrum of carbon necessarily suggests the identity of the substances by which in both cases the light was emitted.

It may be well to state that some phosphorescent and fluorescent bodies give discontinuous spectra in which the light is restricted to certain ranges of refrangibility. There are, however, several considerations which seem to oppose the idea that the light of comets can be of a phosphorescent character. Phosphorescent bodies are usually so highly reflective that the phosphorescence emitted by them is not seen so long as they are exposed to light. This comet was still in the full glare of the sun, and yet the continuous spectrum corresponding to reflected solar light was of extreme feebleness compared with the three bright bands which we have under consideration. The phenomenon of phosphorescence seems to be restricted to bodies in the solid state, a condition which is not apparently in accordance with certain phenomena which have been observed in large comets, such as the outflow of the matter of the nucleus, and the formation of successive envelopes.

There are, indeed, some phenomena of fluorescence, such as that of a nearly transparent liquid becoming an object of some brightness by means of the property which it possesses of absorbing the nearly invisible rays of the spectrum, and dispersing them in a degraded and much more luminous form, which are less obviously inconsistent with cometary phenomena than are those of phosphorescence.

The violent commotions and internal changes which we witness in comets when near the sun seem, however, to connect the great brightness which they then assume more closely with that part of the solar force we call heat. There is also to be considered the fact of the polarized condition of the light of the tail and some parts of the comae of comets, which shows that a part of their light is reflected.

The observations of the spectrum of Comet II. contained in this paper, which show that its light was identical with that emitted by highly heated vapour of carbon, appear to be almost decisive of the nature of cometary light. The great fixity of carbon seems indeed to raise some difficulty in the way of accepting the apparently obvious inference



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