Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 February 1917 — TURNING LIGHT ON THE SUN [ARTICLE]

TURNING LIGHT ON THE SUN

Scientific Explanation That at First Seems a Little Paradoxical to the Average Layman. Some of the scientists connected wjth__the_. Smithsonian institution Jn Washington have been throwing light on the sun. Paradoxical as this may seem, it is not more paradoxical than their discovery that the sun is not a burning ball because it is too hot to burn! They explain it in this way: At 6,000 decrees centigrade, almost all chemical compounds can neither exist nor form. Without chemical compounds you cannot have combustion. Thus, wood ia a chemical compound. When it burns, the combustion is merely the process of oxygen flrtll other air elements uniting with the elements in the wood, which in turn are rearranging themselves into new compounds. At ”6,000 degrees of heat, matter can exist ohly in its basic elements; such as carhop, potassium and the like, nor will the intense heat permit these elements to unite to form combustible compounds. Therefore, the scientists argue, the sun is too hot to burn. What then, they ask, causes its heat? Here the wise men fall to quarreling, some asserting that radioactivity is the secret of the sun’s warmth, while others maintain that the heat results from pressure brought about by the contraction of the sun’s mass about its own center of gravity. The latter theory boasts of the more adherents, but it is by no means established as a fact. Indeed, when submitted to the test of mathematics, there seems to be a fatal objection, for, by a long and complex calculation the contractionists estimate the sun’s age at 17,000,000 years; but as geology tells us the earth is older than this, the sun would then be younger than the earth, an obvious impossibility.—Robert F. Wilson, in St. Nicholas.