Marvels of Astronomy.

Evening Star, Issue 7298, 24 August 1887, Page 3

Marvels of Astronomy.

“ Tenants of Space ” was the subject of an interesting lecture delivered by Mr R. L. J. Ellery, the Government astronomer, to a large audience at the Melbourne Working Men’s College recently, Mr Ellery said that while the distance from the sun, the centre of the solar group, to the farthest known planet, Neptune, was 2,775 millions of miles, his distance from the nearest visible tenant of space beyond, a star forming one of the pointers to the Southern Cross, was calculated as twenty millions of millions of miles, or 226,000 times the sun’s distance from the earth. So that while the members of our little group of tenants were within countable distances, the family was apparently separated by a fearfully long journey from its nearest neighbors. Light travelled at the rate of 185,000 miles per second. It took, therefore, eight and a-quarter minutes to travel from the sun to us. This meant that if the sun were to suddenly die out we should not be aware of it till 500 seconds after the fact; and if Neptune suddenly darkened the news could not reach us for between four or five hours. But suppose the nearest star to bo eclipsed, the phenomenon would not bo visible to us until after the lapse of thirtysix years. The lecturer then showed, by means of an orrery, the relative distances of the planets from the sun. He explained the character of the planets, and stated the theories held with regard to them. Outside the orbit of Neptune, he said, space was, so far as we knew, tenantless, except for the occasional presence of a comet, coming from unknown space to our little system, or travelling from our sun outwards to illimitable distance, perhaps to other systems. After all, our solar system, with all Us planets, planetoids, its life, and Hying beings, was but an atom iu a boundless ocean; and if, as there was good reason to believe, each of the fixed stars was a sun with an attendant group of planets, no words could express the insignificance of our system when compared to the whole surrounding universe.