Читать книгу The New Astronomy онлайн

6 страница из 32

FIG. 1.—THE SUN’S SURROUNDINGS.

The whole of what we have to say about the sun and stars presupposes a knowledge of their size and distance, and we may take it for granted that the reader has at some time or another heard such statements as that the moon’s distance is two hundred and forty thousand miles, and the sun’s ninety-three million (and very probably has forgotten them again as of no practical concern). He will not be offered here the kind of statistics which he would expect in a college text-book; but we must linger a moment on the threshold of our subject—the nature of these bodies—to insist on the real meaning of such figures as those just quoted. We are accustomed to look on the sun and moon as far off together in the sky; and though we know the sun is greater, we are apt to think of them vaguely as things of a common order of largeness, away among the stars. It would be safe to say that though nine out of ten readers have learned that the sun is larger than the moon, and, in fact, larger than the earth itself, most of them do not at all realize that the difference is so enormous that if we could hollow out the sun’s globe and place the earth in the centre, there would still be so much room that the moon might go on moving in her present orbit at two hundred and forty thousand miles from the earth,—all within the globe of the sun itself,—and have plenty of room to spare.