Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 September 1885 — Is the Color of the Sun Blue? [ARTICLE]

Is the Color of the Sun Blue?

It may be asked, what suggested the idea that the sun may be blue, rather than any other color ? My own attention was first directed this way many years ago, when measuring the heat and light from different parts of the sun’s disk. It is known that the sun has an atmosphere of its own, which tempers its heat, and by cutting off certain radiations, and not others, produces the spectral lines we are all familiar w-ith. These lines we customarily study in connection with the absorbing vapors Ot sodium, iron, and so forth, which produce them; but my own attention wks particularly given to the regions of absorption, or to the color it caused, and I found that the sun’s body must be deeply bluish, and that it would shed blue light, except for this apparently colorless solar atmosphere which really plays the part of a reddish veil, letting a little of the-blue appear on the center of the sun’s disk where it is thinnest, and staining the edge red, so that to delicate tests the center of the sun is a pale aquamarine and its edge a garnet. The effect I found to be so important that, if this all but invisible solar atmosphere were diminished by but a third part, the temperature of the British Islands would rise above that of the torrid zone; and this directed my attention to the great practical importance of studying the action oi our own terrestrial atmosphere bn the sun, and the antecendent probability that I our own air was also and independenti ly making the really blue sun into all apparently white one. — Prof. Langley, in Science. Two ladies presented themselves at the door of a fancy ball, and on being asked by the usher what character they impersonated, replied that t 1 ey were not in any special costume, whereupon he bawled out, “Two ladies without any character.” German proverb: “A handsome young woman is always an ugly old one.”