Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 September 1882 — COMETS. [ARTICLE]

COMETS.

Some Fact* at Interest Oancerntn« Tfcmte Erratic Heavenly V tai ter*. [From the London Poet] A great comet visible to all the world is one of the most striking and startling of celestial apparitions; a new star is in reality a much rarer and a much more surprising object. But those who can recognize a new star outside the circle of practical astronomers are few indeed. Moreover, as new stars are but rarely of the first magnitude and appear at intervals of centuries, no superstition, even in the flourishing days of astrology, has ever attached to them. 'That a sun once, invisible or rarely visible to terrestrial eyes should suddenly become a striking astronomical object is the most strange and amazing of all scientific facts to those few who understand its meaning. The stars, of course, are suns, and in all probability each of them has its own circle of planets. For all we know each of them may have* dependent upon it worlds peopled by creatures equal to or even superior to men, creatures whose fate, even if we could understand to know it, would excite our keenest sympathies. Now the change implied by the appearance of a so-called star to the worlds dependent upon it, and to all their inhabitants, must be in the last degree terrible. It is as if our sun had suddenly to blaze out ten or a hundred times as large, and as bright and hot as now. It is scarcely necessary to say that such an occurrence would neither be remembered nor recorded, for no life organized under the existing conditions of life in any one of the planets of which the amount of solar light and heat is the most important element pould survive such a change for twenty-four hours. Even supposing that the increase of heat and light is much more gradual than it seems to telescopic observers on such occasions, an addition even of one-four th to the total heat emitted by the sun would probably destroy all the higher forms of animate nature. The total heat received from the sun must not, of course, be measured by the nominal scale of the thermometer. Zero represents an amount of warmth practically derived in its entirety from the sun, compared with which the difference between zero and tropical sun heat is trivial. It is supposed that .if the heat of the sun were absolutely withdrawn the temperature of our atmosphere would fall to more than 200 degrees below Fahrenheit, a cold which, it is needless to say, no life could endure for many hours. Similarly, an increase of the total heat received from the sun, though merely in the proportion of four to three, would produce a temperature of which no earthly life has had any experience. It would raise a summer temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit to at least 160 degrees Fahrenheit Were the sun’s heat doubled to-morrow we should be exposed to a heat of over 500 degrees—that is to say, a heat sufficient to melt lead and to convert all the waters on the earth’s surface into steam. The revolution implied by the appearance of a new or the sadden brilliancy of a faint star is infinitely greater than this, and means nothing less than the total destruction of life on all the dependent worlds. Yet, awful as are such catastrophes, they, hardly impress the imagination even of astronomers, and are regarded by the public with utter indifference.