This is very significant, but its full meaning may not at first be clear. It is owing to an atmosphere which surrounds the sun, as the air does the earth. When we look horizontally through our own air, as at sunrise and sunset, we gaze through greater thicknesses of it than when we turn our eyes to the zenith. So when we look at the edge of the sun, the line of sight passes through greater depths of this solar atmosphere, and it dims the light shining behind it more than at the centre, where it is thin.
This darkening toward the edge, then, means that the sun has an atmosphere which tempers its heat to us. Whatever the sun’s heat supply is within its globe, if this atmosphere grow thicker, the heat is more confined within, and our earth will grow colder; if the solar atmosphere grow thinner, the sun’s energy will be expended more rapidly, and our earth will grow hotter. This atmosphere, then, is in considerable part, at least, the subject of the action of the spots; this is what they are supposed to carry down or to spout up.
We shall return to the study of it again; but what I want to point out now is that the temperature of the earth, and even the existence of man upon it, depends very much upon this, at first sight, insignificant phenomenon. What, then, is the solar atmosphere? Is it a permanent thing? Not at all. It is more light and unsubstantial than our own air, and is being whirled about by solar winds as ours toss the dust of the streets. It is being sucked down within the body of the sun by some action we do not clearly understand, and returned to the surface by some counter effect which we comprehend no better; and upon this imperfectly understood exchange depends in some way our own safety.
There used to be recorded in medical books the case of a boy who, to represent Phœbus in a Roman mask, was gilded all over to produce the effect of the golden-rayed god, but who died in a few hours because, all the pores of the skin being closed by the gold-leaf, the natural circulation was arrested. We can count with the telescope millions of pores upon the sun’s surface, which are in some way connected with the interchange which has just been spoken of; and if this, his own natural circulation, were arrested or notably diminished, we should see his face grow cold, and know that our own health, with the life of all the human race, was waiting on his recovery.
II.
THE SUN’S SURROUNDINGS.
As I write this, the fields glitter with snow-crystals in the winter noon, and the eye is dazzled with a reflection of the splendor which the sun pours so fully into every nook that by it alone we appear to see everything.
Yet, as the day declines, and the glow of the sunset spreads up to the zenith, there comes out in it the white-shining evening star, which not the light, but the darkness, makes visible; and as the last ruddy twilight fades, not only this neighbor-world, whose light is fed from the sunken sun, but other stars appear, themselves self-shining suns, which were above us all through the day, unseen because of the very light.
As night draws on, we may see the occasional flash of a shooting-star, or perhaps the auroral streamers spreading over the heavens; and remembering that these will fade as the sun rises, and that the nearer they are to it the more completely they will be blotted out, we infer that if the sun were surrounded by a halo of only similar brightness, this would remain forever invisible,—unless, indeed, there were some way of cutting off the light from the sun without obscuring its surroundings. But if we try the experiment of holding up a screen which just conceals the sun, nothing new is seen in its vicinity, for we are also lighted by the neighboring sky, which is so dazzlingly bright with reflected light as effectually to hide anything which may be behind it, so that to get rid of this glare we should need to hang up a screen outside the earth’s atmosphere altogether.
