The Earth Is as a Grain of Dust in a Mighty Mass of Worlds
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| The Earth Is as a Grain of Dust in a Mighty Mass of Worlds |
The universe, then, consists chiefly of a vast multitude of stars, of which we can reckon not less than one hundred millions already. Of these our sun is just one, and certainly neither the biggest nor the brightest, though infinitely more important to us than all the others put together. Around any number of these stars there may be planets, perhaps with moons, circling as we do round our particular sun. And the whole of our earth is but as a grain of dust compared with the whole mighty mass of worlds which we can see on any fine night from the earth's surface.
As to the size of the visible universe, we learn similar lessons. The earth is quite small compared with Jupiter, the giant planet, and Jupiter is small compared with the sun. But if the whole space surrounded by the path of the outermost planet, Neptune, from the sun outwards, were one solid mass, a mighty ball in which sun and earth and Jupiter and all would be lost like drops of water in a lake—even then this great globe would be nothing in size compared with many of the objects we see in the sky, and the distance from boundary to boundary of it would be nothing compared with the distance from it to the nearest star.
In looking at the sky, then, we must always remember the meaning of these tremendous distances between stars and stars, and we must not be deceived, as so many men have been, by the apparently equal distance of a planet and a star beside it.
✨ The Light That Has Been Traveling Since the Spanish Armada Went Down
It is not merely that the planets—which belong to our little system—are nearer than the stars, but that, compared with the stars, they are at our very doors, while the stars are almost infinitely far away. Something happened to a star which we noticed some years ago, and much attention was paid to it. Yet we reckon that whatever it was really happened about when Queen Elizabeth reigned in England, and the light that then left the star only reached our eyes a few years ago.
Thus to the eye of the astronomer the bright points in the sky are of two utterly different kinds. All but seven of them—among these scores of millions—are suns, vastly far away, and many of them vastly bigger than our sun. But seven of these bright points, together with the sun and the moon, and the moons of the other planets that have moons, and a number of very tiny planets, perhaps as small as an American county, that can only be seen through a telescope, are parts of the solar system; they belong to us, they are close neighbours of ours, and have nothing to do with any of the stars among which they seem to lie.
Now let us make a list of the various things that make up the universe, and that astronomers study. First, we shall note down the things that make up our system; we shall think of it as a kind of sample of what makes up millions of other systems in the sky—only that they are so far away that we can only see the suns—or stars—of those systems.
🪐 The Things That Make Up Our Part of the Universe, the Solar System
Our system consists of the sun; the eight large planets of which our earth is one; the moons of those planets; the minor or lesser planets, which all revolve round the sun in a sort of heap, in a path outside the path of Mars and inside the path of Jupiter; a large number of tiny things like stones and pebbles and pieces of rock, much too small for us to see, except when they are caught in our atmosphere and made bright, when we call them meteorites, or "shooting stars"; and a few curious things called comets, which also move round the sun and belong to our system.
We ought really to learn this list. It is much easier to learn than a list of dead kings, most of whom could not read, and it is quite as important. The pebbles, the comets, and the minor planets are the things you are most likely to forget. The names of the major planets we have learned already, and we certainly should learn them and their order outwards from the sun.
Again we must remind ourselves that several of these things may be seen in the sky, either with the naked eye or through a telescope, just as if they were stars, but they are really just about as far from the stars as we are, and belong to us. When astronomers discover a new minor planet—and there are hundreds of them known—they cannot tell whether they are dealing with a tiny little planet, perhaps smaller than Rhode Island, or a star that may be vastly bigger than the sun, until they find that it moves or wanders among the stars, and so is a planet, or wanderer.
🔭 The Great Difficulty of Understanding Things So Far Away
The difficulty people have in learning how utterly different Venus is from a star like Sirius is a difficulty that even astronomers have to reckon with, so great is the influence of distance in deceiving us as to the comparative importance of things. If someone breaks his leg next door we think it more important than if twenty thousand people were drowned by a tidal wave in China; and most people read the papers as if a murder that happened yesterday was a thousand times more important than the Crucifixion or the death of Socrates or Bruno.
We must learn from astronomy that a very tiny thing may be taken for a very big thing, if only it happens to be near enough. We have all heard about Shock-headed Peter, who fell into a pond because he looked up at the sky instead of where he was going. Of course, he should have been more careful; but we should think better of him, or of anyone who values great and beautiful things.
💡 A Gem Worth Remembering:
"The whole of our earth is but as a grain of dust compared with the whole mighty mass of worlds which we can see on any fine night from the earth's surface."
📌 Source:
Excerpt from: The Book of Knowledge — "The Earth Is as a Grain of Dust"
Status: ✅ Public domain — shared here for educational purposes
🏷️ Tags:
Astronomy TheUniverse SolarSystem
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