Minor planet

“ Thirteen major planets they counted as they searched the system with their powerful telectroscope, the outermost more than ten billion miles from the parent sun, while planet six, the one indicated by the world number, was at a distance of five hundred million miles, nearly as far from the sun as Jupiter is from ours, yet the giant sun, giving more than twenty-five times as much heat and light in the blue-white range, heated the planet to approximately the same temperature Earth enjoys. ”

“ A secondary planet two or three thousand miles in diameter, even if solid, would become unstable before coming in contact with its primary, and would undergo a sudden dilapidation; so that a numberless host of its fragments, scattering into smaller orbits and plunging as meteors into the atmosphere of the great central orb, would send forth a flood of brilliancy sufficient to rival solar light, and to proclaim the great work of destruction to the most distant parts of the universe. ”

“ If it were quite immaterial to the welfare of the planetary system whether all the planets moved the same way, or whether some moved one way and some another, then the nebular hypothesis would be entitled to all the support which could be derived from the circumstances of the case. Take, for instance, the eight principal planets Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. All these planets move in the same way around the sun. ”

“ As the planets have been evolved so as to describe their several orbits around the sun, so in like manner the smaller systems of satellites have been so evolved as to describe their orbits round the several planets that are their respective primaries. When a planet, or rather the materials which were drawing together to form a planet, had acquired a predominant attraction for the parts of the primæval nebula in their locality, a portion of the nebulous material became specially associated with the planet. ”

“ The great eccentricity of the smaller planets, their great deviation from the zodiacal path, which is the highway of the large planets, their great number, probably by no means yet exhausted by the discoveries of astronomers; all fall in with the supposition that there are, in the solar system, a vast multitude of such abnormal planetoidal lumps. As I have said, we do not even know that they are approximately spherical; and if they are of the nature of meteoric stones, they are mere crude and irregularly crystallized masses of metal and earth. ”

“ The solution is—there are nine planets in this solar system! Neptune and Uranus are each far vaster than Earth; they are utterly impossible for life as we know it, but a small colony might be established there to refine metals for the distant Earth. We might be able to build domed and sealed cities. But first we could try the nearer planets—Mars, Venus, or some satellites such as our Moon. I certainly hope that this machine will make it possible. ”

“ It is very imperfect from the standpoint of our present knowledge. The solar system as we now know it, when telescopes have been applied with such marvellous diligence and success to the discovery of new bodies, is a system of much greater complexity. To the five old planets have been added two new and majestic planets—Uranus and Neptune—which revolve outside the track of Saturn. Hundreds of smaller planets, invisible to the unaided eye, the asteroids as they are called, also describe their ellipses round the presiding luminary. ”

“ Admitting, however, the hypothesis that these planetary bodies, are the remains of a larger body, which circulated round the sun, nearly in the orbit of the greatest fragment, the system resumes its order, and we discover a regular procession in the distances of the planets, and a general harmony in the form and position of their orbits. But, independently of analogical reasoning, the elements of the new planets furnish several direct arguments, drawn from the eccentricity and inclination of their orbits, and from the position of their perihelia and nodes ”

“ But if we admit that the substance of which the solar system consists once existed in a nebulous condition, and was in rotation, all the above peculiarities follow as necessary mechanical consequences. Nay, more, the formation of planets, the formation of satellites and of asteroids, is accounted for. We see why the outer planets and satellites are larger than the interior ones; why the larger planets rotate rapidly, and the small ones slowly; why of the satellites the outer planets have more, the inner fewer. ”

“ The nucleus that was detached from the great spiral, or the portion of nebula that was separated in whatever way from the parent body, to form Mercury chanced to be a small one. Being small, it was unable to add materially to its mass by attracting other particles to it through the power of gravitation, as a larger planet might do, and thus Mercury was doomed to develop with the limitations that nature’s law has decreed as inevitable in the small bodies of our solar system, be they planets, satellites, or asteroids. ”

“ But till these binary stars were discovered we had no means of guessing that this law had any force beyond our own solar system. Now, however, we learn that the same law and order which reigns in our small group of planets is in action billions of miles away among distant suns, so that they are held together and move round each other as our earth moves round our sun. ”

“ When we come to the perturbations caused by the mutual attractions of the sun, nine planets, twenty moons, one hundred and ninety-two asteroids, millions Page 14 of comets, and innumerable meteoric bodies swarming in space, and when we add to all these, that belong to one solar system, the attractions of all the systems of the other suns that sparkle on a brilliant winter night, we are compelled to say, "As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high above our thoughts and ways must be the thoughts and ways of Him who comprehends and directs them all." ”

“ Coming back to the period when we reduced the residuary nebula to the density of our atmosphere with temperature of 0°, or freezing water, we can with confidence affirm that none of the rings abandoned by it for the formation of planets, could have carried with them any contingent of heat to help them in their formation—any beyond the temperature of space—for even if they did it would very soon be reduced to that. ”

“ A Man that is of Copernicus’s Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry’d round and enlighten’d by the Sun, like the rest of the Planets, cannot but sometimes think, that it’s [2] not improbable that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, and perhaps their Inhabitants too as well as this Earth of ours: Especially if he considers the later Discoveries made in the Heavens since Copernicus’s time, viz. ”

“ But since ’tis certain that the Earth and Jupiter have their Water and Clouds, there is no Reason why the other Planets But not just like ours. should be without them. I can’t say that they are exactly of the same nature with our Water; but that they should be liquid their Use requires, as their Beauty does that they should be [28] clear. For this Water of ours, in Jupiter or Saturn, would be frozen up instantly by reason of the vast distance of the Sun. ”

“ Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets. These may be put on a frame of little sticks and turned round. This causes the tides. Those at the ends of the sticks are enormously far away. From time to time a diligent searching of the sticks reveals new planets. The orbit of a planet is the distance the stick goes round in going round. Astronomy is intensely interesting; it should be done at night, in a high tower in Spitzbergen. This is to avoid the astronomy being interrupted. ”

“ Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, 19th March, 1879 Sir, I have received with much pleasure the table of the satellites of Jupiter which you have been so kind as to send me, and I am encouraged by your interest in the Jovial system to ask you if you have made any special study of the apparent retardation of the eclipses as affected by the geocentric position of Jupiter.
I am told that observations of this kind have been somewhat put out of fashion by other methods of determining quantities related to the velocity of light, but they afford the only method, so far as I know, of getting any estimate of the direction and magnitude of the velocity of the sun with respect to the luminiferous medium. ”

“ If a planet is setting in the West at the time of our birth its angle strikes us in such a manner as to draw us to a certain type of marriage partner, and the planets under the earth, in the North, have an effect upon our condition in the latter part of life. ”

“ Is not this Medium much rarer within the dense Bodies of the Sun, Stars, Planets and Comets, than in the empty celestial Spaces between them? And in passing from them to great distances, doth it not grow denser and denser perpetually, and thereby cause the gravity of those great Bodies towards one another, and of their parts towards the Bodies; every Body endeavouring to go from the denser parts of the Medium towards the rarer? ”

“ We must believe then, that as from hence we see Saturn and Jupiter; if we were in either of the Two, we should discover a great many Worlds which we perceive not; and that the Universe extends so in infinitum." ”

“ Time is merely the measure given to past emotions, and those emotions flowed over me in a tidal sweep which merged all details in one continuous memory. The lone hemisphere of my life was rounded into completeness, and its feverish unrest changed to deep tranquillity, as if a faint, tremulous star were transmuted into a calm, full-orbed planet. ”

“ We are binding the universe together by agencies which pass from sun to planet and from star to star. We are determined to find out all we can about the mysterious ethereal medium supposed to fill all space, and which conveys light and heat from one heavenly body to another, but which yet evades all direct investigation. We are peering into the law of gravitation itself with the full hope of discovering something in its origin which may enable us to evade its action. ”

“ What seems to us for us is true.
The planet has no proper light,
And yet, when Venus is in view,
No primal star is half so bright. ”

“ Bearing this obvious course of zoological reasoning in mind, let us endeavour for a moment to disconnect our thinking selves from the mask of humanity; let us imagine ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth, and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular 'erect and featherless biped,' which some enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a cask of rum. ”

“ Again time passed. In one of the remoter galaxies a super-nova flamed, and on a rocky, barren world a small living thing squirmed experimentally—and to mankind the one event was just as important as the other. ”

“ The geocentric system of astronomy, with its eccentrics and its epicycles, was an hypothesis utterly at variance with fact, which nevertheless did great things for the advancement of astronomical knowledge. ”

“ It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; ”

“ It is such a case as this which gives rise to the doctrine that the mind, in framing the descriptions, adds something of its own which it does not find in the facts.
Yet it is a fact surely, that the planet does describe an ellipse; and a fact which we could see, if we had adequate visual organs and a suitable position. Not having these advantages, but possessing the conception of an ellipse, or (to express the meaning in less technical language) knowing what an ellipse was, Kepler tried whether the observed places of the planet were consistent with such a path. He found they were so; ”

“ It is wonderful to contemplate how the planetary forces balance each other so perfectly that universal equilibrium is maintained despite the disturbances of the 1500 millions which inhabit the earth alone, not to speak of other spheres. ”

“ This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centres of other like systems, these, being formed by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially since the light of the fixed stars is of the same nature with the light of the sun, and from every system light passes into all the other systems: ”

“ Each visible planet is the embodiment of a great and exalted spiritual intelligence Who is the minister of God in that department of His Kingdom, endeavoring to carry out His Will, the latter having in view the ultimate highest good, regardless of temporary ill. ”

“ As Attraction is stronger in small Magnets than in great ones in proportion to their Bulk, and Gravity is greater in the Surfaces of small Planets than in [Pg 352] those of great ones in proportion to their bulk, and small Bodies are agitated much more by electric attraction than great ones; so the smallness of the Rays of Light may contribute very much to the power of the Agent by which they are refracted. ”

“ Also the motion of the planet in its orbit was such that equal areas were described about the Sun by the radius vector of the planet in equal times.—Kepler, Astronomia Nova αἰτολογητός (Prague) , 1609. ”