Table of Contents
By the term “Solar System” it is to be understood that an Astronomer, speaking from the standpoint of an inhabitant of the Earth, wishes to refer to that object, the Sun, which is to him the material and visible centre of life and heat and control, and also to those bodies dependent on the Sun which circulate round it at various distances, deriving their light and heat from the Sun, and known as planets and comets. The statement just made may be regarded as a general truth, but as the strictest accuracy on scientific matters is of the utmost importance, a trivial reservation must perhaps be put upon the foregoing broad assertion. There is some reason for thinking that possibly one of the planets (Jupiter) possesses a little inherent light of its own which is not borrowed from the Sun; whilst of the comets it must certainly be said that, as a rule, they shine with intrinsic, not borrowed light. Respecting these reservations more hereafter.
The planets are divided into “primary” and “secondary.” By a “primary” planet we mean one which directly circulates round the Sun; by a “secondary” planet we mean one which in the first instance circulates round a primary planet, and therefore only in a secondary sense circulates round the Sun. The planets are also “major” or “minor”; this, however, is only a distinction of size.
The secondary planets are usually termed “satellites,” or, very often, in popular language, “moons,” because they own allegiance to their respective primaries just as our Moon--_the_ Moon--does to the Earth. But the use of the term “moons” is inconvenient, and it is better to stick to “satellites.”
There is yet another method of classifying the planets which has its advantages. They are sometimes divided into “inferior” and “superior.” The "inferior" planets are those which travel round the Sun in orbits which are inside the Earth's orbit; the “superior.” planets are those whose orbits are outside the Earth.
There was once a book published, the title of which was “The Sun, Ruler,Fire, Light and Life of the Planetary System.” The title was by no means a bad one, for without doubt the Sun may fairly be said to represent practically all the ideas conveyed by the designations quoted.
There is certainly no one body in creation which is so emphatically pre-eminent as the Sun. Whether or no there are stars which are suns--centres of systems serving in their degree the purposes served by our Sun, I need not now pause to enquire, though I think the idea is a very probable one; but of those celestial objects with which our Earth has a direct relationship, beyond doubt the Sun is unquestionably entitled to the foremost place. It is, as it were, the pivot on which the Earth and all the various bodies comprising the Solar System revolve in their annual progress. It is our source of light and heat, and therefore may be called the great agent by which an Almighty Providence wills to sustain animal and vegetable life. The consideration of all the complicated questions which arise out of these functions of the Sun belongs to the domain of Physics rather than that of Astronomy; still these matters are of such momentous interest that an allusion to them must be made, for they ought not to be lost sight of by the student of Astronomy. Half a century ago the actual state of our knowledge respecting the Sun might without difficulty be brought within the compass of a single chapter in any book on Astronomy, but so enormous has been the development of knowledge respecting the Sun of late years, that it is no longer a question of getting the materials properly into one chapter, but it is a matter of a whole volume being devoted to the Sun, or even, as in the case of Secchi, of two large octavo volumes of 500 pages each being required to cover the whole ground exhaustively. The reader will therefore easily understand that in the space at my disposal in this little work nothing but a passing glimpse can possibly be obtained of this great subject. It is great not only in regard to the vast array of purely astronomical facts which are at a writer's command, but also on account of the extensive ramifications which the subject has into the domains of chemistry, photography, optics and cognate sciences. I shall therefore endeavour to limit myself generally to what an amateur can see for himself with a small telescope, and can readily understand, rather than attempt to say a little something about everything, and fail in the effort.
The mean distance of the Earth from the Sun may be taken to be about 93 millions of miles, and this distance is employed by Astronomers as the unit by which most other long celestial distances are reckoned. The true diameter of the Sun is about 866,000 miles. The surface area exceeds that of the Earth 11,946 times, and the volume is 1,305,000 times greater. The mass or weight of the Sun is 332,000 times that of the Earth, or about 700 times that of all the planets put together. Bulk for bulk the Sun is much lighter than the Earth: whilst a cubic foot of the Earth on an average weighs rather more than 5 times as much as a cubic foot of water, a cubic foot of Sun is only about 3-1/2 times the weight of the same bulk of water. This consideration of the comparative lightness of the Sun (though in his day the Sun was thought to be lighter than it is now supposed to be) led Sir J. Herschel to infer that an intense heat prevails in its interior, independent it may be of its surface heat, so to speak, of which alone we are directly cognizant by the evidence of our senses.
The Sun is a sphere, and is surrounded by an extensive but attenuated envelope, or rather series of envelopes, which taken together bear some analogy to the atmosphere surrounding the Earth. These envelopes, which we shall have to consider more in detail presently, throw out rays of light and heat to the confines of the Solar System, though as to the conditions and circumstances under which that light and heat are generated we are entirely ignorant. Of the potency of the Sun's rays we can form but a feeble conception, for the amount received by the Earth is, it has been calculated, but one 2300-millionth of the whole. Our annual share would, it is supposed, be sufficient to melt a layer of ice spread uniformly over the Earth to a depth of 100 feet, or to heat an ocean of fresh water 60 feet deep from freezing point to boiling point. The illuminating power of the Sun has to be expressed in language of similar profundity. Thus it has been calculated to equal that which would be afforded by 5563 wax candles concentrated at a distance of one foot from the observer. Again, it has been concluded that no fewer than half a million of full moons shining all at once would be required to make up a mass of light equal to that of the Sun. I present all these conclusions to the reader as they are furnished by various physicists who have investigated such matters, but it is rather uncertain as to how much reliance can safely be placed on such calculations in detail.