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National Geographic : 1919 Aug
Contents
THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE Drawn by Albert H. Bumstead CHART SHOWING THE RELATIVE SIZE OF THE SUN, MOON, AND MAJOR PLANETS The stupendous size of the sun in comparison with the several members of its planetary family is emphasized by the distance of the moon from the earth as here plotted on the face of the sun. The differences in their sizes play peculiar tricks of gravity. A hundred pounds would weigh 2,764 pounds on the sun, 252 pounds on Jupiter, 36 pounds on Mars, and 16 pounds on the moon. Spots on the face of the sun are often six times the diameter of the earth, and prominences frequently reach so far into, space that they would completely envelop our moon if they started from the earth (see also page 166). tensive than the most advanced astrono mer dares think or else these stars will run clear through it and out into God only knows where, unless they shall sooner pass close enough to some bigger star that can tame them. TIIE MILKY WAY Called the Silver River of Heaven by the Japanese, pronounced by the ancient mythologists the dust stirred up by Per seus as he hastened to the rescue of An dromeda, the Milky Way sweeps in a vast circle around the celestial sphere. Herschel said it might be likened to a great grindstone. It is made up of mil lions of small stars that cannot be sepa rated without optical aid. This great star stream, coursing its way around the heavens, in a sweep that may require as much as two hundred million years for its circuit, seems to have captured the vast majority of the folk of the universe, and is flowing in unending procession onward and on ward. Here it branches and flows around an island in space; there it is crossed by a bridge of blackness; at another place it is narrow, as though passing through a gorge; and elsewhere it widens out as though flowing through an alluvial valley. Composed of great clusters of multi tudinous suns, many of the individual members vastly larger than our own, one who looks upon the Milky Way can feel, with Buchanan Read, that the stars that are faintest to us may to diviner vision be the noblest of them all. Nor is it easy to neglect those wonder ful objects of the sky, the nebulae, those 180
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