The Source and Mode of Solar Energy Throughout the Universe

by Isaac W. Heysinger

The fact that the orbital planes of very many of these asteroids are greatly inclined to the common planetary plane, and still more greatly inclined to one another, points almost unerringly to the existence during their stage of formation of some powerful force either of internal repulsion or external attraction. That no sufficiently large body could have been present to exercise such attraction so far outside the general planetary plane is self-evident, and if there had been such source of attraction, while the orbital planes of the asteroids might have been deflected from the common plane, they could not have been forced apart so as to differ largely among themselves. Certainly nothing pertaining to the nebular hypothesis could have produced any such effects under any conceivable circumstances, and especially at so late a period of its progress, after all the principal planets had been completed. The only alternative is self-repulsion, and this could only have been due to the causes and their mode of operation already described in this work. In a modified degree these planes exhibit the same irregular orbital deflections as are so conspicuously visible in the orbits of comets, and they must have been unquestionably produced in the same manner. The barren bands or stripes in the area occupied by these asteroids, like the dark or vacant rings of the planet Saturn, may have been largely affected by the perturbing attraction of the neighboring planet Jupiter; but certainly no influence of that great planet (himself in the common planetary plane) could have operated to cast these forming planetoids into planes of diverse inclinations among themselves or to that of his own. On the contrary, his whole force must have been exerted to bring them into the closest harmony with his own orbital movements.

Omitting discussion of the technical difficulties in the application of the nebular theory to demonstrated facts, which may be found in the books, we may again repeat that this theory is not essential to account for the heat of the sun, which finds its real source elsewhere, while, nevertheless, the theory in itself is not incompatible with the views which we have endeavored to present and demonstrate. Certain phenomena, however, have been considered in prior quotations in this work which may aid us to roughly indicate the successive processes by which the evolution of solar systems and galaxies may be explained on another basis which requires no violent assumptions to be made and no suspension of any of nature’s universal laws. The same operations which we see around us at the present time in our own system, if extended to the dimensions of a nebular aggregation, would probably present the same phenomena as those we find partially disclosed in the gaseous nebulæ, particularly the spiral, and these would naturally determine the final production of solar systems such as our own. The gaseous nebulæ, not spiral, and the mixed nebulæ also, would fall into their appropriate categories in the same general plan, and a consistent mode of formation would be presented from the beginning to the end of the different processes.

Spiral nebulæ, reduced from Nichol, after drawings of Lord Rosse. Fig. 1 is from Plate XV., Fig. 2 from Plate XII., and Fig. 3 from frontispiece of Nichol’s “Architecture of the Heavens;” Fig. 4 is from same work, showing a similar development, from a spiral nebula, of a solar system with a double star for its central sun.

It should be observed that the spiral required by Laplace’s nebular theory is essentially a centripetal spiral. The spiral nebulæ we see in the heavens, however, are centrifugal spirals. This is clearly shown in Plates XV., XII., and the frontispiece of Nichol’s “Architecture of the Heavens,” as well as in Plates XIII. and XIV. Plate XV.—the open spiral—is directly contradictory of any phenomena which could occur in accordance with the nebular theory of Laplace. The frontispiece shows the only form which such a nebula could assume at any stage of its career,—that is, a close spiral with nearly circular convolutions. But while this particular form is not only in entire accordance with the hypothesis which we are about to suggest, being in fact one of the later and necessary stages in its progress, any such spiral as that shown in Plate XV. is utterly out of the question in the application of the nebular theory of Laplace or in any of the more recent modifications thereof.

The only hypothesis by which the various phenomena can be adequately explained must almost certainly be based upon the combined action of gravitation and electrospheric repulsion. We find in the corona of our own sun such phenomena manifested in the most striking degree, even in a completed system, and we can well understand that during the early stages of systemic development such phenomena would vastly transcend anything which we could now hope to observe around our own sun. We see this repulsion still more highly developed in the formation of the tails of comets. While these coronal rays are not visible to a distance of more, perhaps, than five million miles from the sun’s disk, we have seen that the tail of Newton’s comet was shot forth to a distance of ninety million miles in a few days, as it were in a moment, by the tremendous electrical repulsion of the solar electrosphere, and that this enormous tail, which, if composed of hydrogen gas alone (it was, of course, enormously more attenuated), would have contained a mass much more than equal to the weight of the sun, was swung around over an arc of one hundred and eighty degrees, giving a radial sweep of the tail over a distance of two hundred and eighty millions of miles in less than four days. And the tails of many other comets have largely transcended in dimensions that of Newton, above cited. We have learned much of the laws which regulate the development of storms, cyclones, whirlwinds, water-spouts, and other vortical phenomena in the atmosphere of our own earth, and can readily apply these principles to phenomena of vastly greater magnitude. We know that the matter of comets’ tails is self-repulsive, as shown in multiple tails, as well as that it is repelled by an adjacent similarly electrified electrosphere,—that of the sun, for example,—as with pith-balls in the familiar class-room experiments; so that we can gather a very fair and complete idea of the processes of nature when dealing with such phenomena on a vastly more extended scale, in which our moments are measured by millions of years and our miles by the almost infinite distances of sidereal and nebular space.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE GENESIS OF SOLAR SYSTEMS AND GALAXIES.

The processes of development of a solar system from the diffused elemental matter of space may then be roughly sketched as follows, premising that each stage may have possibly extended over vast periods of time, and the whole, perhaps, not been completed for millions of years. With the processes of creation time is as nothing.