THE DYING SUN

25 replies

S-ALI.RAZA

2014/01/22 07:36

BY; SIR JAMES JEANS, A few stars are known which are hardly bigger than the earth , but most of them are so large that hundreds of thousands of earths could be packed inside each and leave room to spare; here and there we find an immense star large enough to contain millions of earth. And the total number of grains of sand on all the seashores of the world such is the littleness of our home in space when measured up against the total substance of the universe.

S-ALI.RAZA

2014/01/22 07:47

These millions of stars are wandering about in spacd. A few form groups which journey in company, but most of them travel alone. And they travel through a universe so immense that it is very, very rare event indeed for one star to come anywhere near to another. For the most part each star makes its voyage in complete loneliness, like a ship on an empty ocean. In a scale model in which the stars are ships, the average ship will be well over a million miles from its nearest neighbor. From this it is easy to understand why a star seldom finds another near it.

S-ALI.RAZA

2014/01/22 08:04

We believe, however, that some two thousand million year ago, this rare event took space happenend to come near the sun. Just as the sun and moon raise tides on the earth, so this second star must have raised tides on the surface of the sun. . . . . . . But they would be very different from the little tides which the small mass of the moon raises in our oceans; an immense tidal wave must have traveled over the surface of the sun, at last forming a mountain so high that we can hardly imagine it. . . As the cause of the disturbance came nearer and nearer, the mountain would rise higher and higher. . And before the second star began to move away again, its tidal threw off small parts of itself into space. . These small pieces have been going round the sun ever since. smiley

. . They are the planets, great and small, of which our earth is one. .earth.

S-ALI.RAZA

2014/01/22 08:27

The sun and the other stars we see in the sky are all extremely hot-far too hot life to eXist on them. . . So also no doubts were the pieces of the sun when they were first thrown off. . . Grandually they became cooler, until now they have very little heat of their own left, their warmth coming almost entirely from the radiation which the sun pours down on them. . . . . In course of time one of these cooling pieces gave birth to life. . We do not know how, when or why this happened) it started in simple organisms, whose living power consisted chiefly in their being able to reproduce themselves before dying. . . But from these humble beginninGs came a stream of liFe which, GrOwing EVEr more and morE complex, has in the end produced beinGs whose lives are largely centred in their feelinGs and ambitions, their sence of beauty, and the religion in which lie their highest hopes and noblest desires.

S-ALI.RAZA

2014/01/22 08:39

The stars

themselves are far too hot for this. . . We may think of them as a collection of fires scattered through space, providinG warmth in surroundinGs where the temperature is at most four degree above absolute zero, that is, about 484 degrees of frost on the fahrenheit scale. . . In the immense stretches of space beyond the milky way, it is colder still. .. Away from the fires there is this un-imaGinabal cold of hundreds of degrees of frost; close up to them there is a temperature of thousands of degrees, at which all solids melt all liquids boil.

S-ALI.RAZA

2014/01/22 08:49

Life can eXist only in a narrow belt surroundinG each of these fires at a cartain distance where the (temperature is neither too hot nor too cold) outside these belts lIFE would be frozen; inside it would be burnt up. . . . A rough calculation shows that all such temperature belts, with in which liFe iS POssible, all added together; make up less than a thousand million millionth part of the whole of space. . . And even inside them, lifE must be very rare, for it is extremely unusal for sun to throw off planets as our sun has done.