Suns Larger Than Ours.

Northland Age, Volume 3, Issue 39, 14 May 1907, Page 7

Suns Larger Than Ours.

Earth’s Great Luminary A Celestial Infant. In the course of a lecture on the “ Stars ” which Sir Robert Ball, (he dislinguishod astronomer, delivered at the Royal Institution in London, the lecturer, as reported by (he London “ Daily Telegraph,” said that those orbs which appear so small to us Itecause of their immense distnnec are in reality, of course, great and shining suns. If, he said, wo were to • escape from the earth into space, the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and eventually the sun, would- be-, come invisible; hut tar ns we are from the stars, they would . still shine brightly upon us.

Many of these stars are heavier than our»sun. For example, Mizar, the middle star in the tail of the Great Betlr, is 40 times as heavy as the sun.*' To the naked eye there are five or six thousaud of these heavenly bodies visible. In all probability there arc planets—perhaps habitable worlds like ours—revolving around them. Sixty-one Cygui is the nearest star to us in the Northern Hemisphere. Alpha ccntauri, in the constellation Centaur, in the Southern Hemisphere, is the nearest of all the stars. The sun is a long way 0ff—93,000,- . 000 miles. Now, multiply this by 200,000, and the result is roughly speaking, 20,000,000,000,000, and this is our distance - from Alpha Centauri. Take the speed of an electric current, which is nearly the same as that of light—lßo,ooo miles per second. Suppose a message to be sent at this speed from h point on the earth's surface, it would go seven limes around the earth in one second.

Again, let it he supposed that messages were sent to the different heavenly bodies. To reach the moon at this rate, it would take about one second. In eight minutes a message would get to the sun, and, allowing fora couple of minutes’ delay, one could send a message to the sun and get an answer all within 20 minutes. But to resell Alpha Ccntauri il would take three years, and ng this is the nearest of the -tun*,, what time must it take to gel to the others ?

If when Wellington won the battle of Waterloo in ISI .*>, t fitnews had been telegraphed off immediately, there are some stars 60 remote that it would not yet have reached them. To go a step further, if in lufif, the result of the (‘onquost had been wired to some of three st-iv?., the message would still l»c on its way. If the tidings of the first Christmastide in Bethlehem h ;d been sent to the stars, there ate some orbs, situated in the furthermost depths of space; vet not beyond the reach -if our great telescopes, which could not receive (lie message for. a long time yet.