The Evolution of Worlds/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
EVIDENCE OF THE INITIAL CATASTROPHE IN OUR OWN CASE
BY quite another class of dark bodies than those we contemplated in the last chapter is the immediate space about us tenanted. For that, too, is anything but the void our senses give us to understand. Could we rise a hundred miles above the Earth's surface we should be highly sorry we came, for we should incontinently be killed by flying brickbats. Instead of masses of a sunlike size we should have to do with bits of matter on the average smaller than ourselves but hardly on that account innocuous, as they would strike us with fifteen hundred times the speed of an express train. Only in one respect are the two classes of erratics alike, both remain invisible till they are upon us. Even so, the cause of their visibility is different. The one is announced by the light it reflects, the other by the glow it gives out on its destruction. These last are the meteorites or shooting-stars. They are as well known to every one for their commonness as, fortunately, the first are rare. On any starlight night one need not tarry long before one of these visitants darts across the sky, a brilliant thread of fire gone almost ere it be descried.
Usually this is all of which one is made aware. Silent, ghostlike, the apparition comes and goes, and nothing more of it is either seen or heard. But sometimes there is a good deal more. Occasionally a large ball of flame shoots through the air, a detonation like distant thunder startles the ear, and a luminous train, persisting for several seconds, floats slowly away. Finally if one be fortunate to be near,—but not too near,—one or more masses of stone are seen to fall swiftly and bury themselves in the ground. These are meteorites: far wanderers come at last to rest in graves they have dug themselves.
A great revolution has taken place lately in our ideas concerning meteorites. Indeed, it was not so very long ago, since modern man admitted their astronomic character at all. He looked as askance at them as he did at fossils. It was the fall at Aigle, in Switzerland, April 26, 1803, that first opened men's eyes to the fact that such falls actually occurred. It is more than a nine days' wonder at times how long men, as well as puppies, can remain blind. To admit that stones fell from heaven, however, was not to see whence they came. Their paternity was imputed to nearly every body in the sky. They were at first supposed to have been ejected from earthly volcanic vents, then from volcanoes in the Moon. That they are of domestic manufacture is, however, negatived by the paths they severally pursue. Nor can they for like reason have been ejected from the Sun.
The Earth was not their birthplace. It is alien ground in which they lie at last and from which we transfer them to glass cases in our museums. This fact about their parentage they tell by the speed with which they enter our air. They become visible 100 miles up and explode at from 20 to 10, and their speed has been found to be from 10 to 40 miles a second, which is that of cosmic bodies moving in large elliptic orbits about the Sun,—a speed greater than the Earth could ever have imparted.
Four classes of such small celestial bodies tenant space where the planets move: sporadic shooting-stars, meteorites, meteor-streams, and comets. The discovery of the relation of each of these to the solar system and then to each other forms one of the latest chapters of astronomic history. For they turn out to be generically one.
It was long, however, before this was perceived. The first step was taken simultaneously by Professor Olmstead of Yale and Twining in 1833 from reasoning on the superb November meteor-shower of that year. All the shooting-stars, "thick as snowflakes in a storm," had a common radiant from which they seemed to come. Thus they argued that the meteors must all be travelling in parallel lines along an orbit which the previous shower, of 1799, showed to be periodic. This was the first recognition of a meteor-swarm.
The next advance was when Schiaparelli, in 1862, pointed out the remarkable connection between meteor-swarms and comets. On calculation the August meteor-stream and the comet of 1862 proved to be pursuing exactly the same path. Soon other instances of like association were discovered, and we now know mathematically that meteor-streams can be, deductively that they must be, and observationally that they are, disintegrated comets. More than one comet has even been seen to split.
Then came the recognition that comets are not visitors from space, as Sir Isaac Newton and Laplace supposed, but part and parcel of our own solar system. Without going into the history of the subject, which includes Gauss, Schiaparelli, and finally Fabry's great Memoir, much too little known, the proof can, I think, be made comprehensible without too much technique, thanks to the fact that the Sun is speeding through space at the rate of eleven miles a second.
Orbits described by bodies under the action of a central force are always conic sections, as Sir Isaac Newton proved. There are two classes of such curves: those which return into themselves, such as the circle and ellipse, and those which do not, the hyperbolæ. If a body travel in the first or closed class about the Sun, it is clearly a member of his family; if in the second, it is a visitor who bows to him only in passing and never returns. Which orbit it shall pursue depends at a given distance solely upon the speed of the body; if that speed be one the Sun can control, the body will move in an ellipse; if greater, in an hyperbola. Obviously the Sun can control just the speed he can impart. Now a comet entering the system from without would already possess a motion of its own which, when compounded with the solar-acquired speed, would make one greater than the Sun could master. Comets, therefore, if visitors from space, should all move in hyperbolæ. None for certain do; and only six out of four hundred even hint at it. Comets, then, are all members of the solar family, excentric ones, but not to be denied recognition of kinship for such behavior.
Still, admittance to the solar family circle was denied to meteorites and shooting-stars. Thus Professor Kirkwood, in 1861, had considered "that the motions of some luminous meteors (or cometoids, as perhaps they might be called) have been decidedly indicative of an origin beyond the limits of the solar system." Here cometoid was an apt coinage, but when comets were later shown not to be of extra-solar origin, the reasoning carried luminous meteors in its train.[1] Finally Schiaparelli, in 1871, concluded an able Memoir on the subject with the decision that "a stellar origin for meteorites was the most likely and that meteorites were identifiable with shooting-stars"[2] A pregnant remark this, though not exactly as the author thought, for instead of proving both interstellar, as he intended, both have proved to be solar bound.
It was Professor Newton, in 1889, who first showed that meteorites were pursuing, as a rule, small elliptic orbits about the Sun, and that their motion was direct. He, too, was the first to surmise that meteorites are but bigger shooting-stars.
Now, as to their connection. Of direct evidence we have little. A few meteors have been observed to come from the known radiants of shooting-stars. Two instances we have of the fall of meteorites during star showers. One in 1095, when the Saxon Chronicle tells us stars fell "so thickly that no man could count them, one of which struck the ground and when a bystander cast water upon it steam was raised with a great noise of boiling." The second case was the fall of a siderite, eight pounds' worth of nickel-iron, at Mazapil during the Andromede shower of 1885, which was by many supposed to be a part of the lost Biela comet. It contained graphite enough to pencil its own history, but unfortunately could not write. The direction from
which it came was not recorded, and so the connection between it and the comet not made out.
If our direct knowledge is thus scanty, reasoning affords surer ground for belief. For at this point there steps in a bit of news about the family relations of shooting-stars from a source hardly to have been anticipated. Indeed, it arose from the thought to examine a qualitative statement in Young's "Astronomy" quantitatively. Mathematics is simply precise reasoning, applied usually to the discovery that a pet theory will not work. But sometimes it presents one with an unexpected find. This is what it did here.
It is an interesting fact of observation that more meteors are visible at six o'clock in the morning than at six o'clock at night in the proportion of 3 to 1. This
Diagram explaining their proportionate visibility.
————— denotes true paths.
—— – —— "apparent paths.
– – – – – – "Earth's path.
seeming preference for early rising is due to no matutinality on the part of the meteors, but to the matin aspect then presented by the Earth combined with its orbital motion round the Sun. For at six in the morning the observer stands on the advancing side of the Earth, at the bow of the airship; at six at night he is at the stern. He, therefore, runs into the meteors at sunrise and slips away from them at sunset. He is pelted in the morning in consequence. Just as a pedestrian facing a storm gets wetter in front than behind.
So far the books. Now let us examine this quantitatively according to the direction in which the meteors themselves may be moving before the encounter. Suppose, in the first place, that they were travelling in every possible direction, with the average velocity of the most erratic members of the family, the great comets. On this supposition calculation shows that we ought to meet 5.8 times as many at six in the morning as at six at night. If their orbits were smaller than this, say, something like those of the asteroids, we should find 7.6 to 1 for the ratio.
Suppose, however, that they were all travelling in the same sense as the Earth, direct as it is called in contradistinction to retrograde, and let us calculate what proportion in that case we should meet at the two hours respectively. It turns out to be 2.4 to 1 for the parabolic ones, 3.3 to 1 for the smaller orbited, or almost precisely what observation shows to be the case.1[3] Here, then, a bit of abstract reasoning has apprized us of a most interesting family fact; to wit, that the great majority of shooting-stars are travelling in the same orderly sense as ourselves. Furthermore, as some must be moving in smaller orbits than the mean, others must be journeying in greater; or, in other words, shooting-stars are scattered throughout the system. In short, these little bodies are tiny planets themselves, as truly planets as the asteroids,—asteroids of a general instead of a localized habit.
Thus meteorites and shooting-stars are kin, and from the fact that they are pursuing orbits not very unlike our own we get our initial hint of a community of origin. Indeed, they are the little bricks out of which the whole structure of our solar system was built up. What we encounter to-day are the left-over fragments of what once was, the fraction that has not as yet been swept up by the larger bodies. And this is why these latter-day survivors move, as a rule, direct. To run counter to the consensus of trend is to be subjected to greater chance of extermination. Those that did so have already been weeded out.
From the behavior of meteorites we proceed to scan their appearance. And here we notice some further telltale facts about them. Their conduct informed us of their relationship, their character bespeaks their parentage.
Most meteorites are stones, but one or two per cent are nearly pure iron mixed with nickel. When picked up, they are usually covered with a glossy thin black crust. This overcoat they have put on in coming through our air. Air-begotten, too, are the holes with which many of them are pitted. For entering our atmosphere with their speed in space is equivalent to immersing them suddenly in a blowpipe flame of several thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Thus their surface is burnt and fused to a cinder. Yet in spite of being warm to the touch their hearts are still cosmically cold. The Dhurmsala meteorite falling into moist earth was found an hour afterwards coated with frost.
The Mart Iron.
(Proc. Wash. Acad. of Sci. vol. II. plate VI.)
Agassiz likened it to the Chinese culinary chef d'œuvre "fried ice." It is the cold of space, 200° or more Centigrade below zero, that they bear within, proof of their cosmic habitat.
That they are bits of a once larger mass is evident on their face. Their shape shows that they are not wholes but parts, while their constitution bespeaks them anything but elementary. Diagnosis of it yields perhaps their most interesting bit of news. For it shows their origin. Their autopsy proves them to contain thirty known elements, and not one that is new. The list includes all the substances most common on the Earth's surface, which is suggestive; but, what is still more instructive, these are combined into minerals which largely differ from those with which we are superficially familiar. Professor Newton, whose specialty they were, has said: "In general they show no resemblance in their mechanical or mineralogical structure to the granitic and surface rocks of the Earth. One
(Field Columbian Museum, Chicago.
condition was certainly necessary in their formation, viz. the absence of free oxygen and of enough water to oxidize the iron." Thus they are not of the Earth earthy; nor yet, poor little waifs, of the upper crust of any other body.
In them prove to be occluded gases, which can be got out by heating in the laboratory, and which must have got in when the meteorites were still subjected to great heat and pressure. For only thus could these gases have been absorbed. Both such heat and such pressure accuse some great solid body as origin of this flotsam of the sky. Fragments now, they owe to its disruption their present separate state. This parent mass must
have been much larger and more massive than the
Earth, as the great amount of occluded hydrogen,
METEORITE, TOLUCA.
(Field Columbian Museum, Chicago.)
sometimes one-third the volume at 500° C., of the meteorite seems to testify.
The two classes of meteorites, the stone and the iron, show this further by the very differences they exhibit between themselves. For both the amount and the proportions of the occluded gases in the two prove to be quite distinct. In the stones the quantity of gas is greater and the composition is diverse. In the stones carbonic acid gas is common, carbon monoxide rare; in the irons the ratio is just the other way. Thus Wright found in nine specimens of the iron meteorites:—
| CO2 | CO | H | CH4 |
| 11.5% | 32.4% | 54.1% | 00% of the total; |
in ten of stone:—
| CO2 | CO | H | CH4 |
| 60.1% | 3.4% | 32.0% | 2.1% |
Here, then, the meteorites tell us of another, an earlier, stage of our solar system's history, one that mounts back to before even the nebula arose to which we owe our birth. For the large body to whose dismemberment the meteorites were due can have been no other than the one whose cataclysmic shattering produced that very nebula which was for us the origin of things. The meteorites, by continuing unchanged, link the present to that far-off past. And they tell us, too, that this body must have been dark. For solid, they inform us, it was, and solidity in a heavenly body means deficiency of light.
That such corroborative testimony to a cataclysmic origin is forthcoming in the sky we shall see by turning again to the spiral nebulæ.
Of the two classes of nebulæ which we contemplated in the last chapter, the amorphous and the structural, there is more to be said than we touched on then.
Not only in look are the two quite unlike, but the spectroscope shows that the difference in appearance is associated with dissimilarity of character. For the spectrum of the amorphous proves to consist of a few bright lines, due to hydrogen and nebulium chiefly, in
the green, whence the name green nebulæ. That of the spirals, on the other hand, is continuous, and therefore white. The great nebula in Andromeda was one of the first in which this was recognized; and the perception was pregnant, for no nebula defies resolution more determinedly than it. We may, therefore, infer that it is not made up of stars, certainly big enough for us to see. On the other hand, from the fact that its spectrum is continuous it must be solid or liquid. Young pointed out that this did not follow, because a gas under great pressure also gives a continuous
spectrum. But he forgot that here no such pressure could exist. A nebula of compressed gas could not have an irregular form and would have, in the case of the Andromeda nebula, a mass so enormous as to preclude supposition. Continuity of spectrum here means discontinuity of mass. The spectral solidity of the nebula speaks of a status quo ante, not of a condition of condensation now going on.
Advanced spectroscopic means reveals that the spectra of these "white" nebulæ are not simply continuous.
Thus that of the Andromeda nebula shows very faint dark lines crossing it, apparently accordant with those of the solar spectrum and faint bright ones falling near and probably coincident with those of the Wolf-Rayet stars, due to hydrogen, helium, and so forth. These later observations make practically certain
what earlier ones permitted us just now only to infer: that it is not composed of stars, but of something subtler still; to wit, of meteorites. The reasoning is interesting, as showing that if one have hold of a true idea, the stars in their courses fight for him.
Although Lockyer has long been of opinion that the nebulæ are composed of meteorites, the present argument differs from his. The way in which their spectra establish their constitution may be outlined as follows: the white nebulæ are from their structure evidently in process of evolution, and if they are in stable motion, as we suppose them to be, their parts are moving round their common centre of gravity. As the white nebulæ resist resolution as obstinately as the green, these parts must be not only solid but comminuted (composed of small particles). Now this would be the case were they flocks of meteorites such as we have seen composed our own system once upon a time. Though all are travelling round the centre of gravity of the flock, each is pursuing its own orbit slightly different from, and intersecting those of, its neighbors. Collisions between the meteors must therefore constantly occur, and the question is, are these shocks sufficient to cause light. Let us take our own system and consider two meteorites at our distance from the Sun, travelling in the same sense, the one in an ellipse, the other in a circle, with a major axis five per cent greater and meeting the other at aphelion. This would be no improper jostle for such heavenly bodies. If we calculate the speeds of both and deduct the elliptic from the circular, we shall have the relative speed of collision. It proves to be a half a mile a second or 30 times the speed of an express train. As such a train brought up suddenly against a stone wall would certainly elicit sparks, we see that a speed 30 times as great, whose energy is 900 times greater, is quite competent to a shock sufficient to make us see stars en masse. But, indeed, there must be collisions much more violent than this; both because the central mass is often much greater and because the orbits differ much more, and the effect would increase as the square of the speed. The heat thus generated would cause the meteorites to glow, and at the same time raise the temperature of the gases in and about them. Furthermore, the light would come to us through other non-affected portions of gas between us and the scene of the collision. Thus all three peculiarities of the spectra stand explained: we have a continuous background of light due to heated solid meteorites, the bright lines of glowing gases, and dark lines due to other gases not ignited, lying in our line of sight.
In addition we should perceive another result. Collisions would be both more numerous and more pronounced toward the centre of the nebula, for it must speedily grow denser toward its core owing to the falling in of meteorites, in consequence of shock. Being denser in the centre, the particles would there be thicker and be travelling at greater speed. The nebulæ, therefore, should be brightest at their centres, which is accordant with observation.
Thus from having offered themselves exemplars of the way in which our own system came into being, the white nebulæ assert their present constitution to be that from which we know our system sprang.
Another suggestive fact about the present members of our solar system which has something to say about a past collision is the densities of the different planets. The average density of the four inner planets, Mars, the Earth, Venus, and Mercury is nearly four times that of the four outer ones Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter.2 The discrepancy is striking and cannot be explained by size, as the smallest are the most massive, and if all were primally of like constitution, should be the least compressed. Nor can it be explained simply by greater heat tending to expand them, for Neptune and Uranus show no signs of being very hot. The minor differences between members of each group are probably explicable in part by these two factors, mass and heat, but the great gulf between the two groups cannot so be spanned. We are then driven to the supposition that the materials composing the outer ones were originally lighter. Now this is precisely what should happen had all eight been formed by disruption of a previous body. For its cuticle would be its least dense portion, and on disruption would travel farthest away, not because of being lighter, but because of being on the outside. Parts coming from deeper down would remain near, and be denser intrinsically.
What the present densities of the planets enable us to infer of the cataclysm from which they came, a remarkable set of spectrograms taken not long ago by Dr. V. M. Slipher, at Flagstaff, seems to confirm.
The spectrograms in question were made possible by his production of a new kind of plate. His object was to obtain one which should combine sufficient speed with great photographic extension of the spectrum into the red. For it is in the red end that the absorption lines due to the planets' atmospheres chiefly lie. With the plates heretofore used it was impossible to go much beyond the yellow, the C line marking the Ultima Thule of attent. Not only was it advisable to get more particularity in the parts previously explored, but it was imperative to go beyond into parts as yet unknown. After several attempts he succeeded, the plates when exposed showing the spectra beyond even the A band. Of their wealth of depiction it is only necessary to say that in the spectrum of Neptune 130 lines and bands can easily be counted between the wave-lengths 4600μμ., 7600 μμ. Of these 31 belong to the planet, which compares with 6 found by Huggins, 10 by Vogel, and 9 by Keeler in the part of its spectrum they were able to obtain.
The result was a revelation. The plates exposed a host of lines never previously seen; lines that do not appear in the spectrum of the Sun, nor yet in the added 
spectrum of the atmosphere of the Earth, but are due to the planets' own envelopes. But this was only the starting-point of their disclosures. When in this manner he had taken the color signatures of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, an orderly sequence in their respective absorption bands stood strikingly confessed. In other words, their atmospheres proved not only peculiar to themselves and unlike what we have on Earth, but progressively so according to a definite law. That law was distance from the Sun. When the spectra were arranged vertically in ordered orbital relation outward from the Sun, with that of the lunar for comparison on top, a surprising progression showed down the column in the strange bands, an increase in number and a progressive deepening in tint. The lunar, of course, gives us the Sun and our own air. All else must therefore be of the individual planet's own. Beginning, then, with Jupiter, we note, besides the reenforcement of what we know to be the great water-vapor bands 'a' several new ones, which show still darker in the spectrum of Saturn. The strongest of these is apparently not identifiable with a band in the spectra of Mira Ceti in spite of falling near it. Passing on to Uranus, we perceive these bands still more accentuated, and with them others, some strangers, some solar lines enhanced. Thus the hydrogen lines stand out as in the Sirian stars. All deepen in Neptune, while further newcomers appear.
Thus we are sure that free hydrogen exists in large quantities in the atmospheres of the two outermost planets and most so in the one farthest off. Helium, too, apparently is there, and other gases which in part may be those of long-period stars, decadent suns, in part substances we do not know.
From the fact that these bands are not present in the Sun and apparently in no type of stars, we may perhaps infer that the substances occasioning them are not elements but compounds to us unknown. And from the fact that free hydrogen exists there alongside of them, and apparently helium, too, we may further conclude that they are of a lighter order than can be retained by the Earth.
But now, we may ask, why should these lighter gases be found where they are? It cannot be in consequence simply of the kinetic theory of gases from which a corollary shows that the heaviest bodies would retain their gases longest, because the strange gases are not apportioned according to the sizes of their hosts. Jupiter, by all odds the biggest in mass, has the least, and Saturn, the next weightiest, the next in amount. Nor can title to such gaseous ownership be lodged in the planet's present state. For though Jupiter is the hottest and Saturn the next so, the increased mass more than makes up in restraint what increased temperature adds in molecular volatility—as we perceive in the cases of the Sun and Earth.
No; their envelopes are increasingly strange because their internal constituents are different, and as hydrogen is most abundant in Neptune, the lightest of all the gases, it is inferable that this planet's material is lighter. As distance from the Sun determines their atmospheric clothing, so distance decides upon their bodies, too. It was all a case of primogeniture. The light strange matter that constitutes them was so because it came from the outer part of the dismembered parent orb. Neptune the outermost, Uranus the next, then Saturn and Jupiter came in that order from the several successive layers of the pristine body, while the inner planets came from parts of it deeper down. The major planets were of the skin of the dismembered body, we of its lower flesh.
Very interesting the study of these curious spectral lines from the outer planets for themselves alone; even more so for what one would hardly have imagined: that they should actually tell us something of the genesis of our whole solar system. They corroborate in so far what the meteorites have to say.
That the meteorites are solid and, except for their experiences in coming through our air, bear no marks of external heat, is a fact which is itself significant. It seems to hint not at a crash as their occasioning but at disruptive tidal strains. The parent body appears to have been torn apart without much development of heat. Perhaps, then, we had no gloriously pyrotechnic birth, but a more modest coming into existence. But about this we must ourselves modestly be content to remain for the present in the dark.
Not the least important feature of the theory I have thus outlined is that it finishes out the round of evolution. It becomes a conception sapiens in se ipso totus, teres atque rotundus. To frame a theory that carries one back into the past, to leave one there hung up in heaven, is for inconclusiveness as bad as the ancient fabulous support of the world, which Atlas carried standing on an elephant upheld by a tortoise. What supported the tortoise we were not told. So here, if meteorites were our occasioning, we must account for the meteorites, starting from our present state. This the present presentation does.
Thus do the stones that fall from the sky inform us of two historic events in our solar system's career. They tell us first and directly of a nebula made up of them, out of which the several planets were by agglomeration formed and of which material they are the last ungathered remains. And then they speak to us more remotely but with no less certainty of a time antedating that nebula itself, a time when the nebula's constituents still lay enfolded in the womb of a former Sun.
Man's interest in them hitherto has been, as with other things, chiefly proprietary. Greed of them has grown so keen that legal questions have been raised of the ownership of their finding, and our courts have solemnly declared them not "wild game" but "real estate," and as such belonging to the owner of the land on which they fall.
But to the scientific eye their estate is something more than "real," for theirs is the oldest real estate in the solar system. They were what they are now when the Earth we pride ourselves in owning was but a molten mass.
So that when in future you see these strange stones in rows upon a museum's shelves, regard them not as rarities, in which each museum strives to outdo its neighbors by the quantity it can possess, but as rosetta stones telling us of an epoch in cosmic history long since passed away—of which they alone hold the key. Look at them as the literary do their books, for that which they contain, not as the bibliophile to whom a misprint copy outvalues a corrected one and by whom "uncuts" are the most prized of all.