THE SUN AND THE EARTH

Evening Star, Issue 19666, 20 September 1927, Page 5

THE SUN AND THE EARTH

Professor W. IT. Pickering contributes en interesting article upon tho .sun Ui tlie ' l'"ni'tni^li lly Review,’ in which he s;iys: The sun is, ns wo now, know, simply a slur —not n very bright noi' yet a very faint one, but a. lair average star. Tiic reason it appears so bright to us is merely because wo are so near to it— that, is. relatively speaki„jr_(or the next nearest star is 270,ODil times more remote. All the stars may ho said to contain about the same quantity of matter, hu,t. some give out less than oiie-ihousamlth.part as much light as the sun, while others give out nmiiv thousand times more. 11 we wero ms near to the bright star Sinus as wo arc to the suu the- solid earth, would boil away and wo should exist only ip the form of gas—and Sirius itsclr is not a remarkably bright star. It is about fifty times as bright as our sun, and happens to he quite near us. It is tho combination ot these two tacts that makes it appear so brilliant. When wo say wc are relatively very near the sun we must still recollect that it is .13,000,000 miles away, so that j we travelled towards it with the speed ol a cannon hall, lot ms say at the rate of a mile in two seconds, it would still take us six years to roach it. Its diameter is 860,l)0U miles, or about 110 times that of the earth, so that if the earth were represented by a- small pea, the sun would be the size of a globe some> 2ft in diameter, ami would be situated at a distance ol 22UU. The pea would traced around it at. a. speed of Tit a day, and would carry with it a large grain of sand, one-sixteenth of an inch m diameter, located at a distance from it of 6iu, to represent our muon.