Читать книгу The New Astronomy онлайн

22 страница из 32

We may compare those mysterious things, the filaments, to long grasses growing in the bed of a stream, which show us the direction and the eddies of the current. The likeness holds in more ways than one. They are not lying, as it were, flat upon the surface of the water, but within the medium; and they do not stretch along in any one plane, but they bend down and up. Moreover, they are, as we see, apparently rooted at one end, and their tips rise above the turbid fluid and grow brighter as they are lifted out of it. But perhaps the most significant use of the comparison is made if we ask whether the stream is moving in an eddy like a whirlpool or boiling up from the ground. The question in other words is, “Are these spots themselves the sign of a mere chaotic disturbance, or do they show us by the disposition of these filaments that each is a great solar maelstrom, carrying the surface matter of the sun down into its body? or, finally, are they just the opposite,—something comparable to fiery fountains or volcanoes on the earth, throwing up to the surface the contents of the unknown solar interior?”