Star-land: Being Talks With Young People About the Wonders of the Heavens

by Robert S. Ball

When we throw a lump of coal on the fire, all that is soon left is a little pinch of ashes, and the rest of the coal has vanished. You might think it had been altogether annihilated, but that is not nature’s way. Nothing is ever completely destroyed; it is merely transformed or changed into something else. The greater part of the coal has united with the oxygen which it has obtained from the air, and has formed a new gas, which has ascended the chimney. Every particle that was in the coal can be thus accounted for, and in the act of transformation heat is given out.

A meteor also becomes transformed, but the substance it contains is not lost, though it is changed into glowing vapors. It is known that with heat enough any substance can be turned into vapor, just as water can be boiled into steam. Look at an electric light flashing between two pieces of carbon. Though carbon is one of the most difficult substances to melt, yet such is the intense heat generated by the electric current that the carbon is not only melted, but is actually turned into a vapor, and it is this vapor glowing with heat that gives us the brilliant light. In a similar manner iron can be rendered red-hot, white-hot, and then boiled and transformed into an iron vapor, if we may so call it. There is, indeed, plenty of such iron vapor in the universe. Quantities of it surround the sun and some of the stars.

When ordinary steam is chilled it condenses into little drops of water. So, too, if iron be heated until it is transformed into vapor, and if that vapor be allowed to condense, it will ultimately form a dust, consisting of bits of iron so small that you would require a microscope to examine them. There is iron present in the small shooting stars. Other substances are also contained therein, and all these materials, after being boiled by the intense heat, are transformed into vapor. When the heat subsides, the vapor condenses again into fine dust, so that the ultimate effect of the atmosphere on a shooting star is to grind the little object into excessively fine powder, which is scattered along the track which the object has pursued. Sometimes this powder will continue to glow for minutes after the meteor has vanished, and in the case of some great meteors this stream of luminous dust in the air forms a very striking spectacle. A great meteor, or fire-ball as it is often called, appeared on the 6th of November, 1869. It flew over Devonshire and Cornwall, and left a track fifty miles long and four miles wide. The dust remained visible all along the great highway for nearly an hour; it formed a glowing cloud hanging in the sky, and though originally nearly straight, it became bent and twisted by the winds before it finally disappeared from view.

We have now to see what becomes of this meteoric dust which is being incessantly poured into the air from external space. None of it ever gets away again; for whenever an unfortunate meteor just touches the air it is inevitably captured and pulverized. That dust subsides slowly, but we do not find it easy to distinguish the particles which have come from the shooting stars, because there is so much floating dust which has come from other sources.

A sunbeam is the prettiest way of revealing the existence of the motes with which the air is charged. The sunbeam renders these motes visible exactly in the same way as planets become visible when sunbeams fall on them in far-distant space. But if we have not the sunbeams here, we can throw across the room a beam of electric light, and it is seen glowing all along its track, simply because the air of the room, like air everywhere, is charged with myriads of small floating particles. If you hold the flame of a spirit-lamp beneath this beam, you will see what seems like columns of black smoke ascending through it. But these columns are not smoke, they are pure air, or rather air in which the solid particles have been transformed into vapor by the heat from the spirit-flame.

The motes abound everywhere in the air. We take thousands of them into our lungs every time we breathe. They are on the whole gradually sinking and subsiding downwards, but they yield to every slightest current, so that when looking at a sunbeam you will find them moving in all directions. It is sometimes hard to believe that the little objects are tending downwards, but if you look on the top of a book that has lain for a time on a book-shelf, you find there a quantity of dust, produced by the motes which have gradually subsided where they found a quiet spot and were allowed sufficient time to do so.

The great majority of these particles consist, no doubt, of fragments of terrestrial objects. The dust from the roads, the smoke from the factories, and numerous other sources, are incessantly adding their objectionable particles to the air. There can be no doubt that the shooting stars also contribute their mites to the dust with which the atmosphere is ever charged. The motes in the murky air of our towns have no doubt chiefly originated from sources on this earth. Many of these sources it would be impossible to regard as of a romantic description. We may, however, feel confident that among those teeming myriads of small floating objects are many little particles which, having had their origin from shooting stars, are now gradually sinking to the earth.

This is not a mere surmise, for dust has been collected from lofty Alpine snows, from the depths of the sea, and from other localities far removed from the haunts of men. From such collections, tiny particles of iron have been obtained, which have evidently been once in a molten condition. There is no conceivable explanation for the origin of iron fragments in such situations, except that they have been dropped from shooting stars.

I am sure you have often helped in the making of a gigantic snowball. You begin with a small quantity of snow that can be worked with your hands. Then you have rolled it along the ground until it has become so big and so heavy that you must get a few playmates to help you, until at last it has grown so unwieldy that you can move it no longer, and then you apply your artistic powers to carving out a statue. The snowball has grown by the addition of material to it from without, and as it became heavier and heavier, it lapped up more and more of the snow as it rolled along; so that with each increase of size, its capacity for becoming still larger has also increased. I want to liken our earth to a snowball which goes rolling on through space, and every day, every hour, every minute, is gathering up and taking into it the little shooting stars that it meets with on its way. No doubt the annual accumulation is a very small quantity when compared with the whole size of the earth; but the earth is always drawing in, and now, at all events, never giving back again; so that when this process is carried on long enough, astonishing results may be obtained.

You have all heard many maxims on this subject—how every little saving will at length reach a respectable or a gigantic total. Nature abounds with illustrations of the principle. All the water that thunders over Niagara is merely a sufficient number of little drops of rain collected together. Our earth has been gradually hoarding up, during countless ages, all the meteor dust that has rained upon it; and the larger the earth grows, the bigger is the net which it spreads, and the greater is the power it has to capture the wandering bodies. Thus, our earth, ages and ages ago, may have been considerably smaller than it is at present; in fact, a large proportion of this globe on which we dwell may have been derived from the little shooting stars which incessantly rain in upon its surface.