新城新蔵の銀河概念の確立過程
2001 年 40 巻 218 号 p. 97-103
詳細
2001 年 40 巻 218 号 p. 97-103
In this paper, the author investigated how S.Shinjyo established his conception of the nature of our Galaxy and of spiral nebulae. S.Shinjyo founded the Institute of Cosmical Physics at Kyoto Imperial University, the second laboratory of astronomy in Japan. From 1915 to 1927, he studied the theoretical stellar evolution and established the eccentric nucleus theory that explained how the Cepheid Variables changed their brightness. In his papers, he mentioned not only stellar evolution but also the nature of our Galaxy and of spiral nebulae. Many astronomers were doing similar work at this time. The author focuses our attention to 18 papers by S.Shinjyo. It is important not only to investigate his papers so as to track the establishment of his conception but also to look at other contemporary Japanese papers on conception of the nature of our Galaxy and spiral nebulae. In his 1915 paper, he wrote that our Galaxy has a diameter of 6,600 light years and a spiral structure, and that spiral nebulae is anoter Galaxy. The 1916 paper proposed that our Galaxy didn't have a spiral structure but an ellipse structure. In the 1922 paper, he extended our Galaxy's diameter to 30,000 light years and introduced Shapley's conception of the nature of our Galaxy. In 1925, S.Shinjyo applied Shapley's conception and showed that the spiral nebula is not another Galaxy but rather a large meteoric group. In 1927, S.Shinjyo introduced Hubble's study of M31 explaining that it is 1,000,000 light years away and 45,000 light years in diameter. This means that he agreed the spiral nebula was indeed another Galaxy. Shapley's and Hubble's works influenced S.Shinjyo's work on spiral nebulae. This didn't mean that S.Shinjyo only followed the tendency of international astronomy. He integrated these conceptions, because they were not incompatible with his stellar evolution. But, this literature review generally shows that observational astronomy in Japan depended on the research tendencies of large telescope observational astronomy in America.
