It is in the yellow, or what we may call the autumnal, stage. Miss
Clerke and a few others have questioned this, but the evidence is too
strong to-day. The vast globe, 867,000 miles in diameter, seems to be a
mass of much the same material as the earth--about forty elements have
been identified in it--but at a terrific temperature. The light-giving
surface is found, on the most recent calculations, to have a temperature
of about 6700 degrees C. This surface is an ocean of liquid or vaporised
metals, several thousand miles in depth; some think that the brilliant
light comes chiefly from clouds of incandescent carbon. Overlying it is
a deep layer of the vapours of the molten metals, with a temperature
of about 5500 degrees C.; and to this comparatively cool and
light-absorbing layer we owe the black lines of the solar spectrum.
Above it is an ocean of red-hot hydrogen, and outside this again is
an atmosphere stretching for some hundreds of thousands of miles into
space.
The significant feature, from our point of view, is the "sun-spot";
though the spot may be an area of millions of square miles. These areas
are, of course, dark only by comparison with the intense light of the
rest of the disk. The darkest part of them is 5000 times brighter than
the full moon. It will be seen further, on examining a photograph of
the sun, that a network or veining of this dark material overspreads the
entire surface at all times. There is still some difference of opinion
as to the nature of these areas, but the evidence of the spectroscope
has convinced most astronomers that they are masses of cooler vapour
lying upon, and sinking into, the ocean of liquid fire. Round their
edges, as if responding to the pressure of the more condensed mass,
gigantic spurts and mountains of the white-hot matter of the sun rush
upwards at a rate of fifty or a hundred miles a second, Sometimes they
reach a height of a hundred, and even two hundred, thousand miles,
driving the red-hot hydrogen before them in prodigious and fantastic
flames. Between the black veins over the disk, also, there rise domes
and columns of the liquid fire, some hundreds of miles in diameter,
spreading and sinking at from five to twenty miles a second. The surface
of the sun--how much more the interior!--is an appalling cauldron of
incandescent matter from pole to pole. Every yard of the surface is
a hundred times as intense as the open furnace of a Titanic. From the
depths and from the surface of this fiery ocean, as, on a small scale,
from the surface of the tropical sea, the vapours rise high into the
extensive atmosphere, discharge some of their heat into space, and sink
back, cooler and heavier, upon the disk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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