Solar System

“ And now we are in the Solar System, at the center, or, better, at the focus of which burns the immense and dazzling orb. We have appreciated the grandeur and potency of the solar globe, whose rays spread out in active waves that bear a fecundating illumination to the worlds that gravitate round him; we have appreciated the distance that separates the Sun from the Earth, the third of the planets retained within his domain, or at least I trust that the comparisons of the times required by certain moving objects to traverse this distance have enabled us to conceive it. ”

“ And now, in the unwearied march of science, often baffled but never cast down, it has been announced as the probable solution of all the changes of the past, the progression of the whole solar system, whereby the earth, and all the sister planets, are dragged through infinite space, and brought successively within the sphere of new constellations—now in a hotter and now in a milder efflux of ether—combining its own with a more general movement in a universal whirl—and thus constantly subjected, in all its parts, to ever-varying external influences! ”

“ Extent and Greatness of the Universe—The Solar System: The heavenly bodies belong to two classes, the one comprising a vast multitude of stars, which always preserved their relative positions, as if they were set in a sphere of crystal, while the others moved, each in its own orbit, according to laws which have been described. We now know that these moving bodies, or planets, form a sort of family by themselves, known as the Solar System. ”

“ The solar system itself travels in one region of space, sailing between worlds and worlds, and is surrounded by many other systems as great and complex as itself; and we know that even then we have not reached the limits of the Universe itself. ”

“ Suppose that some great planet, not of the Solar System, barred our path. We should not be taken wholly unawares, for astronomers would know of the approach of the star and our earth to one another months, and perhaps years, beforehand. That would be because the light of the Sun falling on it would be reflected, just as the reflection of the Sun's rays light up the Moon for our eyes. If the strange planet were a very large body, like the sun for bigness, it would become visible far beyond the confines of the Solar System. ”

“ Though no fixed conclusions are yet established about the causes of the brilliant auroral display, yet, as the results of laborious observations, we are assured that the stabler centre of our solar system holds in its powerful sway the several planets at their respective distances, supplying them all with their seasonable light and heat, vibrating sympathetic chords in all, and even controlling under certain—though to us still unknown—laws the electric streamers that flit, apparently lawlessly, in the distant earth’s atmosphere. ”

“ If we grant, for a moment, the hypothesis, it by no means proves that the solar system was formed without the intervention of intelligence and design. It only transfers our view of the skill exercised, and the means employed, to another part of the work. For, how came the sun and its atmosphere to have such materials, such motions, such a constitution, that these consequences followed from their primordial condition? How came the parent vapour thus to be capable of coherence, separation, contraction, solidification? ”

“ When the materials of each solar system were thus set apart from the original mass of star dust or vapour, they began an independent development which led step by step, in the case of our own solar system at least, and presumably also in the case of the other suns, the fixed stars, to the formation of planets and their moons or satellites, all moving around the central sun. ”

“ The supreme controlling power in the solar system is the attraction of the sun. Each planet of the system experiences that attraction, and, in virtue thereof, is constrained to revolve around the sun in an elliptic path. ”

“ Here we have a system of spheres, held by some power to a great central mass, around which they revolve with a fearful velocity. Nor is this all; the Solar System itself, bound by the same mystic chain to an undiscovered centre, moves towards a point in space at the rate of 33,550,000 geographical miles, whilst our earth performs one revolution around the sun. ”

“ CHAPTER III THE SOLAR SYSTEM We have seen, in the course of the last chapter, that the solar system is composed as follows:—there is a central body, the sun, around which revolve along stated paths a number of important bodies known as planets. Certain of these planets, in their courses, carry along in company still smaller bodies called satellites, which revolve around them. ”

“ A theory of the evolution of the solar system, advocated by me during the last seven years, according to which the solar system had its origin in meteoric and cometic aggregation, requires that during the long ages through which the process of development continued there should be occasional outbursts of light and heat in moderate degree from the rest of the system, even to its outskirts. ”

“ These planetary globes themselves, as they coalesced and contracted, left behind or threw off rings of their outer matter, which, in turn, became moons, and finally our solar system with its central sun was evolved as we now see it; development continued, the planets cooled and condensed, life appeared when the conditions became suitable, and the original progressive condensation of the central mass—the sun—still continuing, the evolution of light and heat continues, and will continue in a correlative degree. ”

“ The Sun is a sphere, and is surrounded by an extensive but attenuated envelope, or rather series of envelopes, which taken together bear some analogy to the atmosphere surrounding the Earth. These envelopes, which we shall have to consider more in detail presently, throw out rays of light and heat to the confines of the Solar System, though as to the conditions and circumstances under which that light and heat are generated we are entirely ignorant. ”

“ Looking at the subject from the standpoint of the solar system, with the sun as the central body, we see that while we have the sun, which acts as the controlling centre of the particular system of planets, holding all the planets in their orbits by its attractive power, yet at the same time it is also the source of all light and heat. ”

“ These are the planets of the Solar System, which have no light of their own—of which the Earth, on which we reside, is one—which shine by light reflected from the Sun—and which regularly move around that body at different intervals of time and through different ranges in space. ”

“ Our own solar system, composed as it is of many parts, of thousands of meteors and comets, of numbers of satellites and planets, all revolving around one common centre, also forms a complete and perfect mechanism in itself. For millions and millions of years this perfect mechanism has been harmoniously working together in all its parts, as it moves in all its unity through the realms of infinite space. ”

“ Out in stellar space there are, however, innumerable systems, similar to our own solar system, each distinct and perfect in itself; each being made up of similar parts, as meteors, comets, satellites, planets, and central sun. ”

“ We now come to the best known planet of the solar system, reckoning outwards from the Sun, and though this planet itself, as an object to look at, has no particular interest for the general public, yet the history of its discovery is a matter of extreme interest. ”

“ The solar system possesses less energy in proportion to its moment of momentum than it would require to have if the orbits of the important planets, instead of lying practically in the same plane, were inclined at various angles. Whatever may have been the original disposition of the materials forming the solar system, they must once have contained much more energy than they have at present. ”

“ I have addressed hundreds of audiences in Great Britain and America on the subject of recent solar discoveries, and I have conversed with many hundreds of persons of various capacity and education, from men almost uncultured to men of the highest intellectual power; and my invariable experience has been that solar research derives its chief interest when viewed in relation to the sun's position as the mighty ruler, the steadfast sustainer, the beneficent almoner of the system of worlds to which our earth belongs. ”

“ After having made you understand that the solar system which we inhabit is only a member of an immense family of other solar worlds, only a small fraction of the universe, I wished to show you by the diversity of those worlds, the facility with which nature varies the forces and the physical conditions proper to the stellar worlds, and consequently the living and inanimate types which make a portion of these different stellar worlds. ”

“ Professor Ball points out that thousands of bodies occupy our solar system, and together compose it as a whole; that these have orbits of every sort of eccentricity and direction, and occupying all possible planes which can pass through the sun; [36] that the bodies circle around the sun, some backward and others forward, and that only the planets seem to conform to some common order ”

“ The Planets and Comets which move round the Sun as their center, constitute the Solar System. Those Planets which are nearer the Sun not only finish their circuits sooner, but likewise move faster in their respective Orbits than those which are more remote from him. ”

“ By like habits of thought it is customary to consider the solar system, not as a body, but as an assemblage of orbs, for the science of astronomy has not yet successfully attacked the problem of the relation of the solar system to other stellar systems. ”

“ There is certainly no one body in creation which is so emphatically pre-eminent as the Sun. Whether or no there are stars which are suns—centres of systems serving in their degree the purposes served by our Sun, I need not now pause to enquire, though I think the idea is a very probable one; but of those celestial objects with which our Earth has a direct relationship, beyond doubt the Sun is unquestionably entitled to the foremost place. It is, as it were, the pivot on 19 which the Earth and all the various bodies comprising the Solar System revolve in their annual progress. ”

“ Surely the obvious impression which arises from this view of the subject is, that the solar system, with its adjustments, is the work of an intelligence, who perceives, as self-evident, those truths, to which we attain painfully and slowly, and after all imperfectly; who has employed in every part of creation refined contrivances, which we can only with effort understand ”

“ Astronomy tells us that the distance between solar systems is so enormous as to be out of all proportion to the systems themselves. It is nevertheless probable that the LOGOI of those systems are actually in touch with one another, and that the solar system existing in the centre of each of these inconceivably vast spheres represents the condensation of matter which was originally scattered throughout the whole of that prodigious area, in a condition of the minutest possible subdivision — perhaps in the condition of the ultimate bubbles which are atoms of our highest plane. ”

“ The conception of the solar system as a mechanism, each member of which influences the motion of every other member in accordance with one universal law of attraction, although extremely simple in itself, is easily seen to give rise to very serious difficulties when it is proposed actually to calculate the various motions. ”

“ In the history of the solar system after the unbegun period of its existence dissolved in the plasmic Ether, the first impressive event is electrical evolution, when the Matter of the sun and the planets overbrimmed solar space as a globular or spiral nebula. ”

“ But there are other solar systems within our astral system, which are as yet in a less advanced state, and even some quantities of nebulous matter which have scarcely begun to advance towards the stellar form. ”

“ There are, indeed, obscure intimations that a conversion of this kind is not improbably taking place in the solar system; for, in the sun himself, we have the matter near the equator, by virtue of the rotation of our luminary, carried alternately towards and from the various planets. ”

“ Then we should have that sort of comprehensive view of the solar system which is necessary if we are to visualize as a whole the working of the vast machine, and the motions, sizes, and distances of all the bodies that comprise it. Of such stupendous mechanism our earth is part. ”

“ Our solar system is located in space at the apex of a vast transverse cleft, and nearly at the center of this disk. Let us leave out of consideration the lower half of the Milky Way, as we look upward on a starlit night, and conceive this galaxy to extend only across the midnight sky above us like an archway, with fifty million suns, visible and invisible, exposed in the field of our vision. The nearest of all the fixed stars to us is that known as Alpha Centauri,—not visible, however, in our northern skies. ”