Astronomy of To-day Part 2

With regard to ma.s.s the same order strangely enough holds good. The actual densities of the bodies in question are, however, very different.

The densest or closest packed body of all is the Earth, which is about five and a half times as dense as if it were composed entirely of water.

Venus follows next, then Mars, and then Mercury. The remaining bodies, on the other hand, are relatively loose in structure. Saturn is the least dense of all, less so than water. The density of the Sun is a little greater than that of water.

This method of estimating is, however, subject to a qualification. It must be remembered that in speaking of the Sun, for instance, as being only a little denser than water, we are merely treating the question from the point of view of an average. Certain parts of it in fact will be ever so much denser than water: those are the parts in the centre.

Other portions, for instance, the outside portions, will be very much less dense. It will easily be understood that in all such bodies the densest or most compressed portions are to be found towards the centre; while the portions towards the exterior being less pressed upon, will be less dense.

We now reach a very important point, the question of Gravitation.

_Gravitation_, or _gravity_, as it is often called, is the attractive force which, for instance, causes objects to fall to the earth. Now it seems rather strange that one should say that it is owing to a certain force that things fall towards the earth. All things seem to us to fall so of their own accord, as if it were quite natural, or rather most unnatural if they did not. Why then require a "force" to make them fall?

The story goes that the great Sir Isaac Newton was set a-thinking on this subject by seeing an apple fall from a tree to the earth. He then carried the train of thought further; and, by studying the movements of the moon, he reached the conclusion that a body even so far off as our satellite would be drawn towards the earth in the same manner. This being the case, one will naturally ask why the moon herself does not fall in upon the earth. The answer is indeed found to be that the moon is travelling round and round the earth at a certain rapid pace, and it is this very same rapid pace which keeps her from falling in upon us.

Any one can test this simple fact for himself. If we tie a stone to the end of a string, and keep whirling it round and round fast enough, there will be a strong pull from the stone in an outward direction, and the string will remain tight all the time that the stone is being whirled.

If, however, we gradually slacken the speed at which we are making the stone whirl, a moment will come at length when the string will become limp, and the stone will fall back towards our hand.

It seems, therefore, that there are two causes which maintain the stone at a regular distance all the time it is being steadily whirled. One of these is the continual pull inward towards our hand by means of the string. The other is the continual pull away from us caused by the rate at which the stone is travelling. When the rate of whirling is so regulated that these pulls exactly balance each other, the stone travels comfortably round and round, and shows no tendency either to fall back upon our hand or to break the string and fly away into the air. It is indeed precisely similar with regard to the moon. The continual pull of the earth's gravitation takes the place of the string. If the moon were to go round and round slower than it does, it would tend to fall in towards the earth; if, on the other hand, it were to go faster, it would tend to rush away into s.p.a.ce.

The same kind of pull which the earth exerts upon the objects at its surface, or upon its satellite, the moon, exists through s.p.a.ce so far as we know. Every particle of matter in the universe is found in fact to attract every other particle. The moon, for instance, attracts the earth also, but the controlling force is on the side of the much greater ma.s.s of the earth. This force of gravity or attraction of gravitation, as it is also called, is perfectly regular in its action. Its power depends first of all exactly upon the ma.s.s of the body which exerts it. The gravitational pull of the sun, for instance, reaches out to an enormous distance, controlling perhaps, in their courses, unseen planets circling far beyond the orbit of Neptune. Again, the strength with which the force of gravity acts depends upon distance in a regularly diminishing proportion. Thus, the nearer an object is to the earth, for instance, the stronger is the gravitational pull which it gets from it; the farther off it is, the weaker is this pull. If then the moon were to be brought nearer to the earth, the gravitational pull of the latter would become so much stronger that the moon's rate of motion would have also to increase in due proportion to prevent her from being drawn into the earth. Last of all, the point in a body from which the attraction of gravitation acts, is not necessarily the centre of the body, but rather what is known as its _centre of gravity_, that is to say, the balancing point of all the matter which the body contains.

It should here be noted that the moon does not actually revolve around the centre of gravity of the earth. What really happens is that both orbs revolve around their _common_ centre of gravity, which is a point within the body of the earth, and situated about three thousand miles from its centre. In the same manner the planets and the sun revolve around the centre of gravity of the solar system, which is a point within the body of the sun.

The neatly poised movements of the planets around the sun, and of the satellites around their respective planets, will therefore be readily understood to result from a nice balance between gravitation and speed of motion.

The ma.s.s of the earth is ascertained to be about eighty times that of the moon. Our knowledge of the ma.s.s of a planet is learned from comparing the revolutions of its satellite or satellites around it, with those of the moon around the earth. We are thus enabled to deduce what the ma.s.s of such a planet would be compared to the earth's ma.s.s; that is to say, a study, for instance, of Jupiter's satellite system shows that Jupiter must have a ma.s.s nearly three hundred and eighteen times that of our earth. In the same manner we can argue out the ma.s.s of the sun from the movements of the planets and other bodies of the system around it.

With regard, however, to Venus and Mercury, the problem is by no means such an easy one, as these bodies have no satellites. For information in this latter case we have to rely upon such uncertain evidence as, for instance, the slight disturbances caused in the motion of the earth by the attraction of these planets when they pa.s.s closest to us, or their observed effect upon the motions of such comets as may happen to pa.s.s near to them.

Ma.s.s and weight, though often spoken of as one and the same thing, are by no means so. Ma.s.s, as we have seen, merely means the amount of matter which a body contains. The weight of a body, on the other hand, depends entirely upon the gravitational pull which it receives. The force of gravity at the surface of the earth is, for instance, about six times as great as that at the surface of the moon. All bodies, therefore, weigh about six times as much on the earth as they would upon the moon; or, rather, a body transferred to the moon's surface would weigh only about one-sixth of what it did on the terrestrial surface. It will therefore be seen that if a body of given _ma.s.s_ were to be placed upon planet after planet in turn, its _weight_ would regularly alter according to the force of gravity at each planet's surface.

Gravitation is indeed one of the greatest mysteries of nature. What it is, the means by which it acts, or why such a force should exist at all, are questions to which so far we have not had even the merest hint of an answer. Its action across s.p.a.ce appears to be instantaneous.

The intensity of gravitation is said in mathematical parlance "to vary inversely with the square of the distance." This means that at _twice_ the distance the pull will become only _one-quarter_ as strong, and not one-half as otherwise might be expected. At _four_ times the distance, therefore, it will be _one-sixteenth_ as strong. At the earth's surface a body is pulled by the earth's gravitation, or "falls," as we ordinarily term it, through 16 feet in one _second_ of time; whereas at the distance of the moon the attraction of the earth is so very much weakened that a body would take as long as one _minute_ to fall through the same s.p.a.ce.

Newton's investigations showed that if a body were to be placed _at rest_ in s.p.a.ce entirely away from the attraction of any other body it would remain always in a motionless condition, because there would plainly be no reason why it should move in any one direction rather than in another. And, similarly, if a body were to be projected in a certain direction and at a certain speed, it would move always in the same direction and at the same speed so long as it did not come within the gravitational attraction of any other body.

The possibility of an interaction between the celestial orbs had occurred to astronomers before the time of Newton; for instance, in the ninth century to the Arabian Musa-ben-Shakir, to Camillus Agrippa in 1553, and to Kepler, who suspected its existence from observation of the tides. Horrox also, writing in 1635, spoke of the moon as moved by an _emanation_ from the earth. But no one prior to Newton attempted to examine the question from a mathematical standpoint.

Notwithstanding the acknowledged truth and far-reaching scope of the law of gravitation--for we find its effects exemplified in every portion of the universe--there are yet some minor movements which it does not account for. For instance, there are small irregularities in the movement of Mercury which cannot be explained by the influence of possible intra-Mercurial planets, and similarly there are slight unaccountable deviations in the motions of our neighbour the Moon.

CHAPTER V

CELESTIAL DISTANCES

Up to this we have merely taken a general view of the solar system--a bird's-eye view, so to speak, from s.p.a.ce.

In the course of our inquiry we noted in a rough way the _relative_ distances at which the various planets move around the sun. But we have not yet stated what these distances _actually_ are, and it were therefore well now to turn our attention to this important matter.

Each of us has a fair idea of what a mile is. It is a quarter of an hour's sharp walk, for instance; or yonder village or building, we know, lies such and such a number of miles away.

The measurements which have already been given of the diameters of the various bodies of the solar system appear very great to us, who find that a walk of a few miles at a time taxes our strength; but they are a mere nothing when we consider the distances from the sun at which the various planets revolve in their orbits.

The following table gives these distances in round numbers. As here stated they are what are called "mean" distances; for, as the orbits are oval, the planets vary in their distances from the sun, and we are therefore obliged to strike a kind of average for each case:--

Mercury about 36,000,000 miles.

Venus " 67,200,000 "

Earth " 92,900,000 "

Mars " 141,500,000 "

Jupiter " 483,300,000 "

Saturn " 886,000,000 "

Ura.n.u.s " 1,781,900,000 "

Neptune " 2,791,600,000 "

From the above it will be seen at a glance that we have entered upon a still greater scale of distance than in dealing with the diameters of the various bodies of the system. In that case the distances were limited to thousands of miles; in this, however, we have to deal with millions. A million being ten hundred thousand, it will be noticed that even the diameter of the huge sun is well under a million miles.

How indeed are we to get a grasp of such distances, when those to which we are ordinarily accustomed--the few miles' walk, the little stretch of sea or land which we gaze upon around us--are so utterly minute in comparison? The fact is, that though men may think that they can picture in their minds such immense distances, they actually can not. In matters like these we unconsciously employ a kind of convention, and we estimate a thing as being two or three or more times the size of another. More than this we are unable to do. For instance, our ordinary experience of a mile enables us to judge, in a way, of a stretch of several miles, such as one can take in with a glance; but in our estimation of a thousand miles, or even of one hundred, we are driven back upon a mental trick, so to speak.

In our attempts to realise such immense distances as those in the solar system we are obliged to have recourse to a.n.a.logies; to comparisons with other and simpler facts, though this is at the best a mere self-cheating device. The a.n.a.logy which seems most suited to our purpose here, and one which has often been employed by writers, is borrowed from the rate at which an express train travels.

Let us imagine, for instance, that we possess an express train which is capable of running anywhere, never stops, never requires fuel, and always goes along at sixty miles an hour. Suppose we commence by employing it to gauge the size of our own planet, the earth. Let us send it on a trip around the equator, the span of which is about 24,000 miles. At its sixty-miles-an-hour rate of going, this journey will take nearly 17 days. Next let us send it from the earth to the moon. This distance, 240,000 miles, being ten times as great as the last, will of course take ten times as long to cover, namely, 170 days; that is to say, nearly half a year. Again, let us send it still further afield, to the sun, for example. Here, however, it enters upon a journey which is not to be measured in thousands of miles, as the others were, but in millions. The distance from the earth to the sun, as we have seen in the foregoing table, is about 93 millions of miles. Our express train would take about 178 _years_ to traverse this.

Having arrived at the sun, let us suppose that our train makes a tour right round it. This will take more than five years.

Supposing, finally, that our train were started from the sun, and made to run straight out to the known boundaries of the solar system, that is to say, as far as the orbit of Neptune, it would take over 5000 years to traverse the distance.

That sixty miles an hour is a very great speed any one, I think, will admit who has stood upon the platform of a country station while one of the great mail trains has dashed past. But are not the immensities of s.p.a.ce appalling to contemplate, when one realises that a body moving incessantly at such a rate would take so long as 10,000 years to traverse merely the breadth of our solar system? Ten thousand years!

Just try to conceive it. Why, it is only a little more than half that time since the Pyramids were built, and they mark for us the Dawn of History. And since then half-a-dozen mighty empires have come and gone!

Having thus concluded our general survey of the appearance and dimensions of the solar system, let us next inquire into its position and size in relation to what we call the Universe.

A mere glance at the night sky, when it is free from clouds, shows us that in every direction there are stars; and this holds good, no matter what portion of the globe we visit. The same is really true of the sky by day, though in that case we cannot actually see the stars, for their light is quite overpowered by the dazzling light of the sun.

We thus reach the conclusion that our earth, that our solar system in fact, lies plunged within the midst of a great tangle of stars. What position, by the way, do we occupy in this mighty maze? Are we at the centre, or anywhere near the centre, or where?

It has been indeed amply proved by astronomical research that the stars are bodies giving off a light of their own, just as our sun does; that they are in fact suns, and that our sun is merely one, perhaps indeed a very unimportant member, of this great universe of stars. Each of these stars, or suns, besides, may be the centre of a system similar to what we call our solar system, comprising planets and satellites, comets and meteors;--or perchance indeed some further variety of attendant bodies of which we have no example in our tiny corner of s.p.a.ce. But as to whether one is right in a conjecture of this kind, there is up to the present no proof whatever. No telescope has yet shown a planet in attendance upon one of these distant suns; for such bodies, even if they do exist, are entirely out of the range of our mightiest instruments. On what then can we ground such an a.s.sumption? Merely upon a.n.a.logy; upon the common-sense deduction that as the stars have characteristics similar to our particular star, the sun, it would seem unlikely that ours should be the only such body in the whole of s.p.a.ce which is attended by a planetary system.

"The Stars," using that expression in its most general sense, do not lie at one fixed distance from us, set here and there upon a background of sky. There is in fact no background at all. The brilliant orbs are all around us in s.p.a.ce, at different distances from us and from each other; and we can gaze between them out into the blackness of the void which, perhaps, continues to extend unceasingly long after the very outposts of the stellar universe has been left behind. Shall we then start our imaginary express train once more, and send it out towards the nearest of the stars? This would, however, be a useless experiment. Our express-train method of gauging s.p.a.ce would fail miserably in the attempt to bring home to us the mighty gulf by which we are now faced.

Let us therefore halt for a moment and look back upon the orders of distance with which we have been dealing. First of all we dealt with thousands of miles. Next we saw how they shrank into insignificance when we embarked upon millions. We found, indeed, that our sixty-mile-an-hour train, rushing along without ceasing, would consume nearly the whole of historical time in a journey from the sun to Neptune.

In the s.p.a.ces beyond the solar system we are faced, however, by a new order of distance. From sun to planets is measured in millions of miles, but from sun to sun is measured in billions. But does the mere stating of this fact convey anything? I fear not. For the word "billion" runs as glibly off the tongue as "million," and both are so wholly unrealisable by us that the actual difference between them might easily pa.s.s unnoticed.

Let us, however, make a careful comparison. What is a million? It is a thousand thousands. But what is a billion? It is a million millions.

Consider for a moment! A million of millions. That means a million, each unit of which is again a million. In fact every separate "1" in this million is itself a million. Here is a way of trying to realise this gigantic number. A million seconds make only eleven and a half days and nights. But a billion seconds will make actually more than thirty thousand years!

Having accepted this, let us try and probe with our express train even a little of the new gulf which now lies before us. At our old rate of going it took almost two years to cover a million miles. To cover a billion miles--that is to say, a million times this distance--would thus take of course nearly two million years. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our earth, is some twenty-five billions of miles away. Our express train would thus take about fifty millions of years to reach it!

This shows how useless our ill.u.s.tration, appropriate though it seemed for interplanetary s.p.a.ce, becomes when applied to the interstellar s.p.a.ces. It merely gives us millions in return for billions; and so the mind, driven in upon itself, whirls round and round like a squirrel in its revolving cage. There is, however, a useful ill.u.s.tration still left us, and it is the one which astronomers usually employ in dealing with the distances of the stars. The ill.u.s.tration in question is taken from the velocity of light.