AMAZING ASTRONOMICAL PROBLEMS

Progress, Volume I, Issue 9, 2 July 1906, Page 234

AMAZING ASTRONOMICAL PROBLEMS

We are well assured now, says a writer in a science journal, that the earth as a part of the solar system has had a long history. That all these bodies have reached their present conditions and relations by a process of growth taking millions of years. The same factors that have been active m the past are still operative, producing changes in magnitude,

masses are so large and have such velocity that impact at once reduces them to incandescent gas. This means the possibility of such disaster to the solar system, but it is a present comfort to know that if we were to collide with our nearest neighbour at the present rate, 12 miles a second, it will take nearly 50,000 years to reach it. We have now about a hundred million stars in sight, and astronomers have been surprised that a greater number of the more remote ones are not to be seen. The actual number of stars in our universe

in distances, in temperature and the like. The moon once a corporate part of the earth, has left it through tidal action, and will move still farther away for something like fifty millions of years, after which it will return. The sun is a mass of gas, which, by its contraction through gravitation has become exceedingly hot, and is radiating its energy away at a definite and known rate. As it is limited in size and amount of material, one may without difficulty calculate that the supply of heat from it will last about ten millions of years. It will cease to shine and become cold unless something like a catastrophe shall re-endow it with high temperature and larger volume, when it may repeat the history of these millions of years past. The same conditions of contraction and rise in temperature are observable in thousands of the heavenly bodies, and in all stages from thin gaseous masses to cold non-luminous solid bodies. Now that we know so much of the past history of the solar system, and m addition that our nearest

neighbour is more than 200,000 times farther away than our sun, also that the whole system is itself moving in space at the rate of about 400 millions of miles a year in the direction of the star Vega, we yet need to know whether this motion is a drift or part of an orbit. At present no one knows. The directions and rates of motion of a number of stars have been very well determined, but such measures are not numerous enough to enable us to say whether there is more order in the movements of stars than there is among the molecules of a gas, where molecular collisions are constantly taking place. Sudden Blazing of a new Star. Such phenomena as that of the new star which suddenly blazed out in Perseus are now explained only by assuming stellar collisions wherein the

is much smaller than had been supposed, and instead of there being an in nite number in an infinite space the present outlook is that there is a boundary to the visible universe ; but this remains to be determined, and this problem is engaging attention in several of the great observatories. We all want to know what kind of a universe we live m and the series of events that take place in it. In older times there were supposed to be but seven members of the solar system. The nineteenth century discovered more than five hundred. Eros was discovered only six or eight years ago, while additional moons to both Jupiter and Saturn were ssen for the first time within ten years. It is not probable that all have been discovered. Search is yet being made for other planets. Though limited, one can get some idea of the magnitude of the universe when it appears that some of the remote stars are so far away as to require something like a million years for their light to reach us, though light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles a second —a distance so great that it would take billions of years to reach them at the rate that we now are moving in space, namely, 400 millions of miles a year. Space seems illimitable, time is long, and if matter be indestructible yet the solar system as we know it will have gone through all the phases of growth, maturity, old age and death, long enough before the general aspect of the heavens will have been greatly changed from what they are to-day. This is astronomical work of importance awaiting research.

Planets Inhabited. We desire to know much more concerning the individual planets. Everybody asks, " Are the planets inhabited ? " and no favourable answer has yet been given. If one means by the question, inhabited by such beings as we are structurally, then one can say that if one of us was transported to any of the planets we could not live there a minute. One does not need to assume such likeness, especially since we know something of the past history of man and animals on the earth, adapted to it in form, size structure, habits and intelligence all correlated. To assume intelligence of our type is hardly allowable any more than to assume structures like ours. Vertebrate skeletons are not necessarily the only form in which intelligence of high type may abide. The implements and skill of the astronomers are yet to determine what can be learned about this question. Taking what we know about the development of life on earth it would seem to be insanely improbable that among the million of millions of huge bodies in the universe, all apparently made of the same kinds of matter and subject to the same laws, that the earth is the only one among them all to have life and mind developed upon it. But at present we do not know that it may not be true. Let the twentieth century find out.