OUR PLACE AND DESTINATION IN THE UNIVERSE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 346, 18 March 1911, Page 2

OUR PLACE AND DESTINATION IN THE UNIVERSE.

" Where am I?" is a question that has presented itself to many who have never indulged in astromical speculation. The thinking man not only knows but speculates the fact that the earth is a ball which rotates on an axis, and as the Abbe Moreux has just pointed out, if he happens to live in Paris, he finds, by a simple calculation, shat he is travelling nearly 1,000 feet per second in consequence of the earth's rotation. The next step is to take into account the revolution of the earth around the sun, whereby our philosopher finds that he is travelling at the rate of 1,600,000 miles a day, or 18.6 miles per second —that is to say, seventy times as fast as a cannon hall !

Rut this is a movement around the sun. Where is the sun ? At one time the sun was regarded as the centre of the universe, but now we know that this cannot be, for we have learned that the sun itself is moving with a velocity of ahout 10 miles per second or nearly a million miles per day. The problem of the position of the solar system in the universe was first attacked, with some degree of success, by Sir William Herschel, whose conclusions were drawn from his study of the Milky Way. This white girdle of the celestial sphere is resolved by the telescope into a vast number of stars, of which more than 140 millions have already been counted on telescopic photographs of the heavens. Each of these stars is a sun like our own, probably surrounded by planets like the earth and all these solar systems arc moving, many of them more swiftly than ours. How shall we find ourselves in this vast chaos ? Here we see nebulae which give us faithful pictures of past conditions of our own system. A misty, ill-defined central sun is surrounded by luminous spirals terminating in glowing globes, which are about to drop off and form planets. The beautiful nebulae in Andromeda is of this character. Again, there are vast masses of gas in which no law of formation can be discerned. Such is the great nebula in Orion. Other regions are so thickly studded with stars that the power of modern instruments is taxed to resolve and count them. Yet each of these stars is separated from its neighbours by distances which light, moving 186,000 miles per second, cannot traverse in less than three years., and some of the stars are so distant from us that light occupies several centuries in making the journey. These numbers, which are not fantastic guesses, but a faint idea of the immensity of the universe of which the earth and the sun and planets form so insignificant a part. Doubtless there are suns smaller than ours, but there are many which are thousands of times larger.

HOW Till? END OF THE WORLD MAY COME. It was inferred from earlier measurements of stellar positions, distances and motions, that the solar system was situated comparatively near the centre of a universe shaped li: e a thin doable convex lens. This universe was supposed to rotate as a unit., about its centre, with the result that our sun (comparatively near that centre but absolutely at an immense distance from it) moved in a circle of dimensions so vast that since th : : discovery of its motion it had not deviated appreciably from a straight line, but had steadily directed its course toward the constellation Hercules. This simple scheme must, now he abandoned, according to the great French astronomer, Abbe. Moreux, that, the visible universe consists of two distant parts. We arc compelled to picture to ourselves two f-in,cessions of stars moving in paths which make an angle of 115 degrees with each other. One of these stellar streams moves three tunes as fast as the other. Our sun forms a part of one of the streams mid is at present at their intersection. Hence wo know, in a sense, wheie we are and the direction in which we are moving. But what is our goal, when shall we reach it, and what will happen then ? Or shall we, in this crossing of the congested thoroughfares o; the heavens, he shattered by a collision and resolved into a glowing nebula ? This has been the fate of many stars, of several within the period of human history, and of one Nova Persei within a few years and under our very eyes.—"Popular Science Sittings."