The evolution of worlds from nebulae

by Lee Parker Dean

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Winchell, “Walks and Talks in the Geological Field,” p. 217.

[5] Steele’s “New Descriptive Astronomy,” p. 174.

[6] Chambers’ “Hand Book of Astronomy,” p. 6.

CHAPTER III.
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.