Are the Planets Inhabited Author:E. Walter Maunder Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE ELEMENTS IN SPACE IT is now an old story, but still possessing its interest, how Fraunhofer analysed the light of th... more »e Sun by making it pass through a narrow slit and a prism, and found that the broad rainbow- tinted band of light so obtained was interrupted by hundreds of narrow dark lines, images in negative of the slit; and how Kirchhoff succeeded in proving that two of these dark lines were caused by the white light of the solar photosphere having suffered absorption at the Sun by passing through a stratum of glowing sodium vapour. From that time forward it has been known that the Sun is surrounded by an atmosphere of intensely heated gases, among which figure many of those elements familiar to us in the solid form on the Earth, such as iron, cobalt, nickel, copper, manganese, and the like. These metals, here the very types of solid bodies, are permanent gases on the Sun. The Sun, then, is in an essentially gaseous condition, enclosed by the luminous shell which we term the photosphere. This shell Prof. C. A. Young and the majority of astronomers regard asconsisting of a relatively thin layer of glowing clouds, justifying the quaint conceit of R. A. Proctor, who spoke of the Sun as a " Bubble" ; that is, a globe of gas surrounded by an envelope so thin in comparison as to be a mere film. There has been much difference of opinion as to the substance forming these clouds, but the theory is still widely held which was first put forward by Dr. Johnstone Stoney in 1867, that they are due to the condensation of carbon, the most refractory of all known elements. Prof. Abbot, however, refuses to believe in a surface of this nature, holding that the temperature of the Sun is too high even at the surface to permit any such condensation. ...« less