The Distance of the New Star
Some of the newspapers are telling us, with more or less definiteness, that the distance of the new star, recently discovered in the constellation Perseus, is so many million times the distance from the earth to the sun, and that it is some thousands of times larger than our sun. The simple fact is that its distance is a matter of pure conjecture. No astronomer has ever attempted to measure it, for the simple reason that the earth has not traveled far enough since its discovery to form a base line for the computation of the star's parallax. Its distance may be so great that no parallax will be shown at all. But the determination of this point is a matter of time, and before it can be computed the star may have entirely disappeared.