Once in a year, that is in a little more than three hundred and sixty-five days, we travel around the sun, but remain away from that planet at a distance of about ninety-two million miles.
As we look upward at the sky at night we see, in all directions, the countless stars. Most pronounced among them and looking much the same, though of a different nature, are the planets and once in a while a comet. A few faintly shining clouds are seen—the Milky Way and Nebulae.
The most striking, and yet the most insignificant of them all is the moon.
During that period known as “day” to us the sun alone is visible, flooding the air with its light and thereby hiding all other heavenly bodies from the vision of the unaided eye—a few of them being visible through a telescope.
These heavenly bodies, for the most part, are globes like the earth. They whirl on their axes and move swiftly through space. They are classified as the solar system, made up of the sun, the planets which move round the sun and the satellites, which, in turn, attend the planets in their motion around the sun. Thus the moon attends the earth when the earth travels around the sun.
The sun, ninety-two million miles away from the earth, is a hot self-luminous globe, with a diameter of eight hundred and sixty-six thousand five hundred miles, or one hundred nine and one-half times that of the earth. The temperature at the sun surface has been calculated to range between ten and fifteen thousand degrees Fahrenheit—a heat we cannot conceive.
Unlike the earth and the other planets, the sun, the center of our universe, is stationary; but it rotates on its own axis, inclined at seven and one-quarter degrees, once in twenty-seven and a half days. This motion has been established by observing the sun spots.
These sun spots vary in size from five hundred to fifty thousand miles in diameter and a group of such spots was found to be one hundred and fifty thousand miles across. They are short-lived phenomena, sometimes remaining only a few days but frequently a month or two. They appear in their greatest magnitude at periods of eleven years and are the cause of extreme drought on earth, with its resultant destruction of crops and vegetation, and consequent famines.
While until recently it was believed that the sun spots were eruptions on the sun, some astronomers now claim that, as the sun spots are cooler than the sun, they indicate the downpour of meteoric showers thrown by Jupiter and Saturn into the sun, thereby increasing the heat radiating from the sun.
The sun spots manifest themselves in world-wide heat waves, earthquakes, tidal waves, cloud bursts, floods, waterspouts, hailstorms and hurricanes in many widely separated parts of the earth. History has never seen the equal of the destruction caused by the last phenomena. A glance at a few of the recent disasters and natural phenomena shows the following: