MARVELS OF ASTRONOMY.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1654, 1 November 1887, Page 3

MARVELS OF ASTRONOMY.

“ Tenants of Space,” was the subject of an 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 Ellery said that while the distance from the sun, the centre of the solar group, to 'the farthest known planet, Neptune, was 2775 millions of miles, his distance from the nearest visible tenant of space beyond, a star forming one of the pointers to the Southern Cross, was calculated as twenty million? of millions of miles, or 266,000 times the sun’s distance from the earth. So that while the members of our little group of tenants were within countable distances, the 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, therefore, eight and a quarter minutes to travel from the sun to us. This means that if the sun were to die out we should not be aware of it until 500 seconds after the fact; and if Neptune suddenly darkened the news could not reach us for between four and five hours. But suppose the nearest star to be eclipsed the phenomenon would not be visible to us until after the lapse of thirty-six 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 planets, and stated the theories held with regard to them. Outside the orbit of Neptune, he said, space was, so far as we knew, tenantless, except for the occasional presence of a comet, coming from some unknown spice 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 planets, planetoids, its life, and living beings was but as an atom in a boundless ocean ; and if, as there was good reason to believe, each of the fixed stars was a sun with an attendant grout) of planets, no words could express the insignificance of our system when compared with the whole surrounding universe.