The call of the stars; a popular introduction to a knowledge of the starry skies with their romance and legend . stimated asover seven hundred times larger than all the planetsand satellites of the system put together, and wascalled by the late Schiaparelli the most magnificentwork of the Almighty, is about 864,750 miles indiameter, and some 92,820,000 miles distant from theEarth. It is so large that were it hollowed out like an im-mense rubber ball, and the Earth placed at its centre,the Moon could revolve at its present average distanceof about 239,000 miles, and there would still be roomfor
The call of the stars; a popular introduction to a knowledge of the starry skies with their romance and legend . stimated asover seven hundred times larger than all the planetsand satellites of the system put together, and wascalled by the late Schiaparelli the most magnificentwork of the Almighty, is about 864,750 miles indiameter, and some 92,820,000 miles distant from theEarth. It is so large that were it hollowed out like an im-mense rubber ball, and the Earth placed at its centre,the Moon could revolve at its present average distanceof about 239,000 miles, and there would still be roomfor another satellite to circle in an orbit over 190,000miles exterior to the Moons orbit. And again, so faroff is it, that a railway train, which, travelling night andday at the uniform rate of sixty miles an hour, could 265 266 The Call of the Stars make a circuit of the Earth in seventeen days, and ajourney to the Moon in 5)4 months, would take 176years to reach the Sun, and about 5| years to travelround it. Then, too, this same train, travelling at itssixty-miles-an-hour rate, would take over 5300 years to. Fig. 5. The Orbits of the Terrestrial Planets. make the trip to the orbit of Neptune, the presentknown boundary of the local solar system. ? The planets, which may be divided into two principalclasses—the inner or terrestrial, and the outer or major—are dark opaque bodies that are illuminated by theSun as they circle round it, their relative distances fromwhich have generally a rough kind of order that fol-lows what is known as Bodes Law. They are believedto have been evolved, as mentioned in the previouschapter, from various nuclei which existed in the The Local Solar System 267 original spiral, and are all of the same age. The inneror terrestrial planets (Fig. 5) were evolved from smallnuclei, and are all of them relatively small in size, andrather dense in structure. They are also comparativelynear together, travel at higher speed, and have few or
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