CHAPTER VI - THE SUN

Summary

So far we have been concerned only with the smaller of the objects in space. Smallest of all were the pellets of matter which we describe as shooting-stars when they fall into the earth's atmosphere; these are so small that we could hold thousands of them in each hand. The largest object we have discussed so far has been the giant planet Jupiter, with about eleven times the diameter of the earth. A box big enough to hold Jupiter would hold II × II × II or 1331 earths—eleven each way. Yet even Jupiter is quite small in comparison with the sun, which we shall examine in the present chapter, and the sun is smaller still in comparison with the larger stars and other objects that we shall examine subsequently. Broadly speaking, the sun is as much bigger than Jupiter as Jupiter is bigger than the earth—Jupiter could contain more than a thousand earths, but the sun could contain more than a thousand Jupiters. To carry on the sequence, each of the blue stars we shall consider later could contain more than a thousand suns, while each of the “giant red” stars could contain more than a thousand blue stars. And each of certain nebulae which we shall discuss in our last chapter of all not only could contain, but actually does contain, thousands of millions of stars.