MARVELS OF ASTRONOMY

Ashburton Guardian, Volume VII, Issue 1657, 8 September 1887, Page 3

MARVELS OF ASTRONOMY

(< Tenants of Spaoe " was the subject of •U Interesting lecture delivered by Mr R. L, J, Ellery , the Government astronomer, to a large audience at the Melbourne Working Men's College recently. Mr EUery said that while the distance from the tun, the centre of the solar group, to the farthest known planet, Neptune, was 3776 millions of miles, his distance from the nearest visible tenant of space beyond • star forming one of the pointers to the Southern Gross, was calculated as twenty millions of millions of milee, or 226 000 times the flan's distance from the earth. Bo that while the members of our little group of tenants were within countable distances, the family was apparently separated by a fearful long joun ey from itf nearest neighbors. Light travelled at ihe rate of 185,000 miles per second. It took, therefore, eight and a quarter minutes to travel from the sun to us. This meant that if the sun were suddenly to die out we should not be aware of it till 500 sees after tbe fact ; and if Neptune suddenly darkened the news could not reach us between four and five hours, But suppose the nearest star to be eclipsed, the pheconomen would not be risible to us until after the iapse of thirtylix years. The lecturer then showed, by means of an orrery, the relative distances of. the planets from the sun. He explained the character of the plan3ts, •nd stated the theories held with regard to them, Outside the orbit of Neptune, he said, space was, bo far ac we knew, tensntless, except for the occasim.al pretence of a comet, coming from unknown ■paoe to our little system, or travelling from our sun outwards to illimitable distance, perhaps to other systems. After all, our solar system, with all its planetr, planetoids, its life, ani living beings, was but an atom m a boundless ooean ; and if, as there was good reason to believe, each of the fixed stars was a •an with an attendant group of planets, no words conld express the insignificance of our system when compared to the whole surrounding universe.