THE COOLING OF THE PLANETS.
1st. If the sun was once so much greater that it reached out to
Neptune,—as it must have done if Neptune was cast off from it,—would
not its poles have flattened like those of Earth, and have cooled
first, and any matter thrown off from the globe have been at the poles?
Yet the poles of Earth seem scarcely to change as it turns on its axis,
and a body thrown off from them would not go around the planet; but,
on cooling, fall back to the liquid centre. Such being the case why
has earth a density greater than the sun, and what was the power that
kept, and still keeps it, from sinking into the sun? Knowing as we do
the power of gravitation, we should suppose these masses to be so held
that they could not escape from the sun. Saturn, with its three glowing
rings, we behold as a blazing star,[7] but why has it not cooled? The
sun must have thrown off the planet millions of years ago, for it now
lies about 900 millions of miles distant, and the contracting of the
sun on its radius would make it 450 millions of centuries since it
spread out as far as Saturn. Hence, if Earth is cold Saturn should be
the same in that far-away, colder region; and being ten times farther
from the sun than the earth, it should have been formed ten times as
long ago, according to the nebular hypothesis.
If Saturn yet throws off rings may not the sun do the same until cool
as Saturn and reduced to a like size? At the time the sun spread out
to that planet its diameter must have been 1800 millions of miles,
whereas now it is about 900,000 miles. With such a diameter shrunken
to less than one million of miles we would ask why Saturn is not yet
cool? Should we extend the sun’s diameter again to reach Saturn, it
would have, as stated, a radius of 900 millions of miles; giving 10,000
million times its present volume. By contracting the same at a like
rate it would be 450 millions of centuries ago that Saturn was thrown
off from the sun. Now, as Saturn has only 1/1700 part of the sun’s
volume, with a density much less, and lies far out in space; why in
all these millions of years has it not cooled instead of holding heat
and continuing to throw off rings? If it possesses the exceedingly
light density sometimes claimed for it,[8] and has a gravitation at its
surface but little more than that of Earth, one would suppose to find
it a much colder object than the earth.
2nd. The little planets called asteroids take somewhat the form of
a nebula and are distant from the sun from two to three hundred and
fifteen millions of miles. Yet these planets, numbering some three
hundred, do not, if taken all together, form more than one-fourth
the size of Earth, yet they must be older than either Earth or Mars,
according to the above hypothesis, and should likewise be cold.
For a time the explosion of some planet was thought to have formed
them, but the great number since discovered, and their position and
movements, give no credence to the belief that they are fragments
of a shattered planet; for Vesta as seen by the naked eye, and
Ceres and Pallas, show by their orbits that to be an impossibility.
They are now thought to have been thrown from the sun as a ring,
and that the ring, instead of forming into one planet, has been
broken up into these numberless asteroids. If this supposition be
true we should expect to find them all at about the same distance
from the sun. Instead we find that their distances vary millions
of miles, making nearly as great a difference between them as is
their distance from the sun. What, then, must that ring have been
when it is claimed that the combined mass of the asteroids would not
exceed over 400 miles! Proctor tells us: “The asteroids themselves
supply an argument in favor of the nebular theory rendering its
probability so strong as practically to amount to certainty; for
the antecedent probability against the observed uniformity of
direction of the 175 asteroids by chance, or in any conceivable
way except as the result of some process of evolution is equal to
that of tossing either ‘head’ or ‘tail’ 175 times running, or about
23,945,290,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
to 1.”[9] Notwithstanding the above statement we would argue that when
those asteroids were formed the sun must have reached out to them,
if they were cast off from it; whereas we see them distant from the
sun only from two to three hundred million miles, while Jupiter is
480 millions of miles distant from it, so that to-day the asteroids
are about as far from one as the other. How could they thus get away
from the sun’s gravitation when it is still a thousand times larger
than Jupiter and at the time they were thrown off—or _detached_—must
have been much more than that. It is claimed that Jupiter has still
great power over these asteroids, and if so the sun should have a much
greater power because of its size and proximity.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] “Saturn has a mean diameter that is about nine times that of Earth
while his volume exceeds hers more than 700 times. Within an extreme
span of upwards of four millions of miles on either side of Saturn’s
globe there circle eight satellites and two millions of worlds, the
least of which is probably as large as Mars. Then within the path of
the innermost of these moons there is the wonderful ring system of
Saturn. The span of this system of rings amounts to about 176,000
miles; that is its outermost edge lies about 88,000 miles from Saturn’s
centre, while the complete system has a breadth of 37,600 miles, but
the innermost part, to a breadth of nearly 9,000 miles is dark. Through
this dark ring the outline of Saturn’s disc can be clearly perceived.
In fact this wonderful dark ring is transparent. The bright parts of
the system form two rings, separated from each other by a dark, but not
perfectly black, circular division about 1700 miles broad.”
Proctor, “Expanse of the Heavens,” p. 96.
[8] “Its mean density is less than that of any known planet, being less
than one-seventh of the earth.”
Proctor, “Expanse of the Heavens,” p. 97.
[9] Proctor, “Poetry of Astronomy,” p. 366.