MARVELS OF ASTRONOMY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume VII, Issue 1696, 27 October 1887, Page 3

MARVELS OF ASTRONOMY.

" Tenants of Spsoa " was the subject of an interesting lecture delivered by Mr R. L. J. Blery, the Government astronomer to a Urge audience at tbe Melbourne Working Men's College recently. Mr Ellery eald that while tbe distance from the san, the centre of the solar group, to the farthest known, planet, Nepture, was was £775 millions of miles, his dlatacoe from the nearest visible tenant of space beyond, a star forming one of the pointers to the Southern Cross, was calculated as tweuty millions of millions of miles, or 266,000 tlmeß the sun's distance from the earth, So that while the members of one little group of tenants were within countable distances, tho family was apparently separated by a fearfully long journey from its nearest neighbors. Light travelled at the rate of 185,000 miles per second. It took, therafore, eight and a quarter minutes to travel from the sun to. us. This means that if the sun were to die out we ■hoo.ld not be aware of it unti 500 second* after the faot ; and if Neptune suddenly daikened the news oould not reach no for between four and five hours Bat suppose the nearest star to be eclipsed, the phenomenon would not be visible to as until after tbe lapse of thirty-six years The lecturer then showed, by means of an orrery the relative distances of the planets from the Bun. He explained the character of the planets, and stated the theories held with regard to them. Outfide tbe orbit of Neptune, he said, space was, so far as we knew, tenantleas, except for the occasional presence of a comet, coming from some unknown space to oar litt'e system, cr travelling from oar sun outwards to inimitable distance perh*pi to other systems. After ol}, our solar system, with all its planets, planetoids, its life, and living beiqga waa but as an atom m a boundless ocean ; and if, as there was good reason to believe, each of the fixed stars was a eun wjth an attendant group of planets, no words could express the lnilgnificance of oar system when compared to the whole lurroandiog