Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1883-09-13
GRANT COUNTY, WISCONSIN.
THE sun.
Summary of What IL Known About she
Center or Our System.

summary of What 10 known About the
Center or Our System.
1t is now pretty generally admitted
that the sun is but a "single star
among millions, thousands of which ex-
coed him In brightness, magnitude and
power" But he is our sun. "Cut of
his rays for even single month and the
earth would die--all life upon its surface
would cease" What the ancients felt in
this matter and formulated into systems
of sun worship the modern scientific
spirit, aided by the telescope, the pyr-
hellometer, the actinometer and the
speetroscope, has evolved into the doc
trines Of the correlation of forces and
the conservation of energy: Cd The
center of the sun is "mass of in
tensely heated gases - CD its face, its
philosophers, is a shell of luminous
clouds, the home of the sunspots (3)
its immediate environment or chrome
sphere is composed mainly of inconsid-
cradle gases "a the corona or next
outer circle of the sun has as yet "re-
ceiyed no explanation which commands
universal assent"
The attraction between the sun and
the earth amounts to thirty-six hundred
quadrillions of tons; in figures, SO fol-
lowed by seventeen ciphers." Yet our
little planet holds its own and seems in
no special hurry to drop into the arms of
the father of lights. "The suns
volume is 1900, 900 times that of the
earth, while its mass is only $780, 900
times as great As to size it is about
as pin point to the head of a flour bar
rel, but the suns average density found
Nv ~
only about one-quarter that of the earth.
The earth is little fellow, but compact
and we'll made, lot the infidels say what
they will, and the sun, too, is good in
its way. You not only cannot look tho
sun in the face with the naked eye, but
the appliances used m the study of the
moon, planets and stars will not answer
at all for solar work TO find the spots
on the sun you need only throw its i'm
age through telescope on to screen
of cardboard, and they are as plain as
freckles on some folks faces.
Ever since Newton il has been known
that a beam of light is decomposable
into its constituent colors by passing it
through prism, and, under certain cir
cumstances, the result is a rainbow-tinted
band or ribbon, which has been called
the solar spectrum. In this spectrum
Wollaston, in 1902, discovered certain
dark shadings, aud from that day to this
astronomers have been endeavoring, by
means of the spectrum, TO determine the
nature of the elements of the sun. In
1877. DIR. Henry Draper, of New York,
announced that he had discovered the
presence of oxygen in the sun. In fact,
it is claimed 10y philosophy that the
primal elements of all suns and worlds
are the same, but the work of science is
to prove this or prove the contrary.
There are good many guesses as to
what sun spots really are. Cavities
filed with gases and vapors, which pro-
duce observation" sounds right, but to-
morrow some other theory may sound
better Sun spots are not distributed
over the suns surface with anything like
uniformity. They occur mainly in two
zones on each side of the equator and
between the ATTITUDES of 100 and 800.
But the cause of this distributionis not
known"
AS to the "Sun's Light and Heat"
Herschei calcul tel that the amount of
heat received or the earths surface, With
the sun in the q 18th would melt an inch
thickness of ice in two hours and thir-
teen minutes nearly, and of course, if
such sheet of ice were hundred and
eighty-six million miles in diameter il
would all melt in the same length of
time. "Of this enormous outflow Of
heat the earth of course intercepts only
small portion, about 1-2200000000.
But even this minute fraction is enough
10 melt yearly at the earth's equator
layer of ice something over 10 feet
thick" Better than this, our little earth
intercepts enough of the suns light and
heat each day to clothe all clouds with
beauty, to make the fruits ripen and the
flowers bloom; better still, to keep our
heart-blood warm and our pulses beat
ing, and it is not from science alone, but
from the reverent vision Of common eyes
that we must get much of the best light
and heat of the sun, the world or the
stars. --IhiiadeiDhia Times.