IMMENSITY OF THE UNIVERSE

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 120, 14 February 1921, Page 9

IMMENSITY OF THE UNIVERSE

ORIGIN UF STARS AND PLANETS A JOURNEY OF FANTASY Emile Belot, vice-president of the Astronomical Society of France, has propounded a new explanation of the origin of the etars and of the planets. In. thehighly imaginative style so characteristic of the French, he sets his readers astride a ray of light and then sets forth on a journey through the vast sea of space. "Let us quit the earth leaping astride a ray of light which, travelling at a velocity of 186,000 miles per second aa taken Bmin. 18sec. to come from the sun, passing on its way the planets of Mercury and Venus. In a trifle more than another second we shall roach tho moon (221,500 miles distant); in 4min. 20sec. more we shall come to Mars, but it will take us a quarter of an hour longer to cross the zone of a thousand little planets before reaching Jupiter in the course of 35m1:m., Saturn in 70min., Uranus in 2hr. 30min., and Neptune in 4hr. Along our path we shall meet many comets which remote from the sun, possess no tails, and, indeed, are scarcely visible, being merely small spherical nebulae. "The sun now' looks to us merely like seme .great star, but we shall not leave its sphere of attraction until our journey has continued! for two years; for we shall not reach, the/ nearest brilliant star. A Cantauri, until after four years of travel, during which we shall have covered a distance of twenty-four thousand billion miles. Hero our first surprise awaits us; the star A Centauri is a double star composed of two suns gravitating about each other. Our own single sun, situated at the centre of our system, is an exception, as we shall find, for in our ultra-rapid journey we shall encounter not only many double suns but many that are triple, quadruple, etc. ( "But now we must begin- to count 'by centuries in the record of our voyage. In an extent of space measured by from one to three centuries we shall encounter the great amorphous nebulae, Orion, Cygnus, etc., faintly glowing gaseous masses which doubtless form part of the original raw materials employed in the formation .of worlds, and which contain above all hydrogen and helium. At the end of sixty centuries of this journey of fantasy we shall have had the opportunity to count a billion or two of stars; we shall have had a fleeting glance at. milßona of planets revolving around fixed stars and bearing billions of .human beings, whom wo shall never have tho pleasure of knowing! And yet we shall have arrived only at the edge of tho central nucleus of the Milky Way, and not even at those star clouds which resemble in photographs a golden dust east into the infinite shadow of space. Here, perhaps, we shall see the birth of a world, of a planetary system like our own, from the shock of n gaseous star coming into collision with a nebula in one of those sudden conflagrations, which reveals itself to us as a 'Nova.* "Having now had the patience to admire this majestic spectacle during a journey of 600 centuries, travelling at a velocity of 186.000 miles per second, the celestial horizon will at last appear free from 'till stellar dust. AVhat awaits us beyond? In the direction of Sagittarius wo shall perce.ive musses of stars which have been called the Island Universes, these open or globular masses are gigantic agglomerations, each one of which may contain from 30,000 to 100,000 suns, n sphere of fire turning round an axis like a lighthouse illuminating the infinite ocean of ether. Let us stride across one of these masses (that of the Delphinus) without- seven-leagued boots, which would necessitate a journey of 2000 centuries, and which appears to be at the extreme confines of one of the spirals of the wonderful Milky AVay. "Lot us dive now into sidereal depths-, we shall now perceive only spiral nebulae, i.e., the other milk ways—the universes external to our own, which are numbered by millions. The nearest one is the spiral nebula of Andromeda, which rushes towards us at a velocity of ISO miles per second, and wherein the telescope has already beheld the birth of no fewer than fifteen, new stars. And how far is Andromeda from us? Possibly at a distance, which measured m years of light, amounts to from 5000 to 6000 centuries. , ... .1 "Thus we measure velocities, thus we observe cosmic shocks and record phenomena which took place rtt least 200 000 years ago, and probably more than o(X),000 years ago! We are photographing today stars which must have ceased to exist before man made his appearance upon earth. Behold the grandiose and impressive tableau of the Cosmos revealed by modem astronomy. How different this is as regards space and time from the infinitesimal sidereal horizon known to the astronomers scarcely a century ago.