THE SUN

The sun is the source of the power of all the mechanical forces of the earth: it rays are the magician’s arms stretched out over our universe. We cannot reflect on the immensity of its influence and not feel that it is taking too great a view of human nature to attribute the formation of all things for man. The sun emits 2,300 millions of heat in all directions. How many come to the earth? One only! So nature takes no high consideration for the human race when she gives but this crumb for our use. The heat that the sun expends is sufficient to boil 12,000 million cubic miles of ice-cold water per minute. And yet the sun is a finite body whose mass we know. How – if the sun be a burning mass – is its enormous waste supplied? The electric light before the disc of the sun seems dark; so we have no energies here capable of equalling solar effects. If the sun were a lump of coal it would be burnt out in 4,600 years. What then supplies its waste? We know that space is not only filled with stars, but that there are in it numberless non-luminous bodies too small to see, but of which we have evidence in the dense streams of meteorites which, periodically, our earth encounters. In Boston (U.S.), in nine hours, 240,000 were seen flashing through our atmosphere. Here, then, is a source of supply for the central orb. Suppose the velocity of a cosmical body falling towards the earth be seven miles per second, the same body would strike the sun at the rate of 390 miles per second, and the heat produced by its contact against the sun’s surface would be 9,000 times the temperature of the same asteroid if it were composed of coal and burnt. Nor would this raining down of matter visibly increase the size of the sun. To a globe of two feet diameter our earth is in size but a pea. If such a quantity of matter were spread over its entire surface, how imperceptible the addition; and yet our earth falling on to the sun would supply its waste for a hundred years. We are familiar with the scriptural prediction that “the earth shall melt with fervent heat.” If the earth were merely arrested in its orbit, this consummation might be literally fulfilled; while, if the earth fell into the sun, the force of impact would equal 6,345 worlds of coal as burnt together. –

London Review.