The name is absent

The Light of the Stars 65
secs, or more than 200,000 light years. They are scat-
tered somewhat irregularly through a somewhat oval
region, symmetrical about the plane of the Milky Way,
and almost 100,000 parsecs in maximum extent. The
centre of this region is by no means near the sun—as is
obvious from the fact that most of the globular clusters
are found in one hemisphere of the heavens, and hardly
any in the other—but is distant about 13,000 parsecs, in
the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. It appears,
therefore, that we are very far indeed from being at the
centre of the universe. Astronomers, like others, used to
think so, and were confirmed in their belief by the fact
that the number of stars visible to the naked eye, and
even in a small telescope, is substantially the same in
all regions near the Milky Way (though smaller, of
course, near its poles). This means that such stars are
distributed around us almost uniformly in all directions
in the galactic plane. But we now believe, with good
reason, that the cause of this is that practically all the
stars visible with a small telescope lie within relatively
small distances—two or three thousand parsecs—which
do not reach out to the boundaries of the universe of
stars. It is only when we consider very faint stars, which
are much more remote, that the real eccentricity of dis-
tribution becomes apparent. In other terms, we used
to suppose that our soundings of the depths of stellar
space gave us the same results in all directions: but what
they really recorded was “no bottom.” It is only with
the longer measuring line afforded by modern photometric
methods of determining distance that we strike bottom at
last. This expansion of our conceptions of the extent and
magnitude of the stellar universe is one of the most re-
markable of all the advances of modern Sidereal
Astronomy.

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