Seven planets

“ We shall again, as formerly, have to go nearly as far beyond the last planet as that planet is from the Sun. The mind cannot grasp these huge distances. Still we travel on to the last planet, Neptune, revolving on its lonely orbit; sunk so deep into space that, though it rushes round the Sun at the rate of 22,000 miles per hour, it takes 164 of our years to complete one revolution. Now let us look back from this remote point. What do we see? One planet only, Uranus, is visible to the unaided eye; the giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, have disappeared, and the Sun itself is now only a star ”

“ After, in this way, throwing off the first planet, the central sun continued to cool and grow smaller, until the increase in the rate of its rotation was again such as to permit its centrifugal force to form a second ring around its equator, which being left as the sun continued to contract, gave rise to another planet, or to Uranus, and so on until the four major planets and the four minor planets were born. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is well known that in consequence of the gravitation which pervades the solar system, each of the planets has its movements mainly subordinated to the attraction of the sun. But each of the planets attracts every other planet. In consequence of these attractions, the orbits of the planets are to some extent affected. The mutual actions of the planets present many problems of the highest interest, and, it should be added, of the greatest difficulty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The dimensions of the ellipses vary, of course, for the different planets, and the periods that the planets require for their several revolutions are also widely different in the cases of the different bodies; for the greater the diameter of 37a planet’s orbit, the longer is the time required for that planet to complete a single journey round the sun. The sun presiding at the common focus of the orbits while governing the planets by its attraction, at the same time that it illumines them with its light and warms them by its rays, gives the conception of the solar system. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The great fleet returned to a changed Solar system. Sol was still at its center, but there were now ten planets, including two new ones that the sun had captured from Nigra in return for Pluto; and all the planets had shifted a bit in their orbits.
What the ultimate effect on the planets will be, we cannot say as yet. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The smallest of these planets will not answer for this purpose; they can only be seen in powerful telescopes, and they do not admit of being measured with the necessary accuracy. It is also obvious that the planets to be chosen for observation must come as near the earth as possible. In favourable circumstances, some of the minor planets will approach the earth to a distance which is about three-quarters of the distance of the sun. ”

“ If we include the comets, we may say that the solar system includes many thousands of bodies, in orbits of all sizes, shapes, and positions, only agreeing in the fact that the sun occupies a focus common to all. The majority of these bodies are imponderable in comparison with planets, and their orbits are placed anyhow, so that, although they [Pg 361] may suffer much from the perturbations of the other bodies, they can in no case inflict any appreciable disturbance. There are, however, a few great planets capable of producing vast disturbances ”

“ The eight large planets and the 650 ± minor planets in our system revolve around the sun in the same direction and, excepting a small proportion of the asteroids, so nearly in the sun's equatorial plane that the parts of their orbit planes lying within the limits for intramercurial planets would be projected upon the photographed area. ”

“ 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 bear in mind that, in addition to these various contrasts, the planets and satellites also differ in respect to their distances from each other and their primary; in respect to the inclinations of their orbits, the inclinations of their axes, their times of rotation on their axes, their specific gravities, and their physical constitutions; we see what a high degree of heterogeneity the solar system exhibits, when compared with the almost complete homogeneity of the nebulous mass out of which it is supposed to have originated. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As compared with other heavenly bodies, therefore, the sun and the planets are very near together, occupying a very small space in the immensity of the universe, immeasurably isolated from all the other systems and, so far as we know, immeasurably smaller as a system than most of them.
The whole body of the planets is divided according to size into two classes, the major and the minor planets. When we refer generally to the planets, the major planets only are meant. The minor planets are usually called the asteroids, or planetoids. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ ⁠By these considerations, however, Kepler was led to enunciate his third law, that the squares of the periodic times of planets are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the sun.—Kepler, Prodromus Dissertationum Mathematicarum continens Mysterium Cosmographicum, etc. ”

“ Now I could appreciate the worth of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of Mars, Venus, Saturn to planets which have no place in classical mythology. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the interval. ”

“ Most certainly, some planets are not inhabited, but others are, and among these there must exist life under all conditions and phases of development. ”

“ Writers may be classified as meteors, planets and fixed stars. A meteor makes a striking effect for a moment. You look up and cry There! and it is gone for ever. Planets and wandering stars last a much longer time. They often outshine the fixed stars and are confounded with them by the inexperienced; but this only because they are near. It is not long before they must yield their place; nay, the light they give is reflected only, and the sphere of their influence is confined to their own orbit—their contemporaries. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was the ancient opinion of not a few, in the earliest ages of philosophy, that the fixed stars stood immoveable in the highest parts of the world; that under the fixed stars the planets were carried about the sun; that the earth, as one of the planets, described an annual course about the sun, while by a diurnal motion it was in the mean time revolved about its own axis; and that the sun, as the common fire which served to warm the whole, was fixed in the centre of the universe.
This was the philosophy taught of old by Philolaus, Aristarchus of Samos, Plato in his riper years, and the whole sect of the Pythagoreans; ”

“ But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side, elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and, on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature, — here they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man. ”

“ Now since in so many Things they thus agree, what can be more probable than that in others they agree too; and that the other Planets are as beautiful and as well stock’d with Inhabitants as the Earth? Or what shadow of Reason can there be why they should not? ”

“ The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. ”

“ Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."
Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. ”