WHEN THE SUN DIES.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 144351, 16 March 1914, Page 3

WHEN THE SUN DIES.

IN FIVE MILLION YEARS. In the course of his monthly astronomical notes in the Christchurch Press, the Rev. P. W. Pairclough writes; Professor Doolittle recently stated that the son would cease to warm the earth in about five millions of years. We give a sketch of the death of the mighty monarch as it has been predicted by writers of the Arrhenius school. The sun is constantly pouring out 2260 million times more heat than the earth receives from him. It is believed that he can maintain this prodigal expenditure for many millions of years to come, but ultimately his powers will begin to fail. He will gradually become redder and yield less heat and light; islands and continents of crust will form, through which terrific volcanic outbreaks will occur, causing his light to flicker. Slowly the invading; cold of space will gain ground and the crust will become universal, except for the volcanoes, which will be vast and numerous and will emit oceans of gas, principally steam and carbonic acid gas. As the crust cools, the deluge will set in. At first the water will be sent rolling back in mighty clouds of steam; but they constantly carry the heat they have received upward and give it up to space, returning for more with tt deadly persistence. In the end the-cokl will win, and the clouds that are thousands of miles deep will settle into n universal steaming ocean. By and by it will cease to steam, and the stan( that are stj]l alive will glitter in li desolate and placid sea, in which thif oceans of the earth that once was would make but a little bay. It will be desolate because only the more elementary forms of life can be in it, and it will be placid because there will be no sun to cause winds to blew. The sun, bavins lived for others, will die unfriended and alone. Forsaken at his utmost need By those his former bounty fed. The only lighthouses of that, dread sea will be the lurid torch of groaning volcanoes. the only wind their belches of gas, the only waves those caused by sunqnakes; for, doubtless, the crust will fold and crumple as the interior cools! and shrinks. Hence there will be loud, too, as desolate as the sea. Steadily the cold goes on increasing, for thm-o is no day to relieve the night, and the night is cloudless and cold. The sea begins to freeze, and there is no thaw. Deeper and deeper do the roots of the ice strike till they grasp the cold law? at the bottom. . When the crust of the sun is as thick as that of the earth, that is, about ® miles; the surface temperature will probably be minus 200 C. But long before that stage is reached the carbonic acid will have fallen from the atmosphere of the sun in enow npon. the thiok-ribbod ice. At minus 300, however, the nitrogen and most of the other gases of the atmosphere will begin to fall hi rain upon the snow that rests upon the ice. Soon there will be another ocean on top of the one already solidified. The centre of the sun will still be extremely hot, but the loss of beat will now be so excessrraly slow that Arrhenius calculates that 150,000 billion years would pass before he was frozen throughout. . Long before this enormous period had passed. However, Arrhenius thinks that the sun’s turn to be renewed by collision would arrive. If we suppose tire dead suns to bo one hundred tunes more numerous than the luminous ones a very moderate estimate, he says—then, fKJoordmg to the of proofthilitiee, our dead sm shemid have a collision in about 1000 billion year's! One of the results of impact ho thinks, would be that enormous clouds of dust would be driven to a great distance and circulate around the new sun in irregular rings, sometimes almost eclipsing him and at others unveiling him In this way he would account for Mira, that blazes up every eleven months, from the 9th to the 2nd magnitude. He points out that all longperiod variables are red, like Mira. Fine dust absorbs the blue and rays, but allows the red to pass. Ho instances the red sunsets that occurred when the dust of the krak&toa eruption, in the Strarte of Sunda, was in the upper atmosphere. On tnia dust theory the red stars, instead of being the old and dying ones, may bethe newer ones— the Haze stars of prehistoric ages.