Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 November 1882 — The Sun. [ARTICLE]

The Sun.

In any reference to the physical Imstory of the sun, the stupendous magnitude of its sphere must be kept vividly present to the mind. With a diameter 105 times longer than that of the earth’s, the solar orb looks out into space from a surface that is twelve thousand times larger than the one which the earth enjoys. The bulk of the sun is one million three hundred thousand times that of the earth. If the surface of the sun were a thin external rind, or shell, and the earth were placed in the middle of this hollow sphere, not only would the moon have space to circle in its usual orbit without ever getting outside of the solar shell, but there would be room also for a second satellite, nearly as far again as the moon, to accomplish a similar course. The weight of the sun is three hundred thousand times the weight of the earth, or, in round numbers, two thousand millions of millions of millions of millions of tons. The mean distance of the sun from the earth is now so well ascertained, through investigations which have been made in several distinct ways, that there can scarcely be in the estimate an error of 500,000 miles. The distance, at the present time given, is 92,885,000 miles. This measure is in itself so vast that, if any traveler were to move at the rate of four miles an hour for ten hours a day, it would take him 6,300 years to reach the sun. Sound would traverse the interval if there were anything in space capable of transmitting sonorous vibrations, in fourteen years, and a cannon ball sustaining its initial velocity throughout, would do the same thing in nine years. A curious illustration, attributed to Prof. Mendenhall, is to the effect that an infant, with an arm long enough when stretched out from the earth to reach the sun, would die of old age before it could be conscious, through the transmission of the nervous impression from the hand to the brain, that it had burned its fingers. In order that the earth, thus moving round the snn with a chasm of 93,000,000 miles of intervening space between them, may not be drawn to the sun by the preponderant attraction of 330,000 times larger mass, it has to shoot forward in its path with a momental velocity fifty times more rapid than that of the swiftest rifle ball. But, in moving through twenty miles of this onward path, the earth is drawn out < f a straight line by something less than the eighth part of an inch. This deviation is properly the source from which the amount of the solar attraction has been ascertained. If the earth were suddenly arrested in its onward flight, and its momentum was in that way destroyed, it would be drawn to the sun, by an irresistible force of its attraction, in four months, or in the twenty-seventh part of the time which a cannon ball would take to complete the same journey.—Edinburgh Review. A French widow was very indignant because the railroad company did not pay her any more than they did the widow of another man who had also been killed by a railroad train. The railroad officials said that the tw’O men came to their death under s'milar cir-. cumstances. “Oh, that’s all very well as a matter of talk,” said the widow, “but, as a matter of fact, my husband was killed by the lightning express, while her man was run over by a wayfreight train.”