Marvels of the Sun.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XIX, Issue 6048, 13 September 1894, Page 3

Marvels of the Sun.

M. Camille Flammarion has an attractive method of communicating scientific facts, and in an article in a recent issue of " Science Shiftings" he gives a characteristic description of the marvels of the sun. The celestial body, he tells us, weighs 324,000 times the weight of our globe, and is 1,283,000 times the size of our earth. To form an idea of the superiority of the greatness of the sun over the earth we can represent the sun by a sphere of 22 metres—larger than the Pantheon of Paris, and place beside it to represent the earth a toy balloon of 20 centimetres in diameter. The real dimensions of the sun are concluded from its apparent dimensions com bined with its distance. Six different methods of measurement prove that if the entire earth were transported to the same distance as the sun, it would be seen at an angle of 176*4deg.—that is to say, at a distance equal to 11,693 times the diameter of our globe, or in other words, 449,000,000 of kilometers. The only way of appreciating such a distance is to measure it by the time a train would take to traverse it. Suppose, for instance, an express train going at sixty kilometers an hour set out to reach the sun, the duration of the journey would be 149,000,000 minutes, or 2,483,333 hours, or 103,472 days, or 283 years. If sent off at once such a train would reach the sun in the year 2,177. But an express train travels at a relatively slow rate of speed. Sensation, which is rapid, almost instantaneous, travels at the rate of twentyeight meters per second. If a child asked for the sun, and his nurse gave it to him, and he had arms long enough to reach the sun so that it burnt his fingers, he would never feel this burn. The child would become an old man and die long before the sensation of burning could pass from the tips of his fingers to bis brain, for the timg requisite for the transmission of this sensation would not be less than 163 years.