"Pushed apart thus, the two new suns would form an ordinary double star, or binary, the two revolving around each other. And by their division almost all the planets of the solar system would without doubt be engulfed in one or the other of the two suns. The four inner planets would inevitably be annihilated when the sun split into two suns, when those two rushed apart from each other. For if they were not directly in the path of the two separating suns, they would be drawn into those separating suns almost at once by the tremendous gravitational disturbances attendant upon this tremendous cataclysm. They would have no more chance of life, indeed, than midges in a great blaze. And in the same way Jupiter and Saturn would be whirled out of their orbits, since those orbits would be fatally confused and changed by the first division of the sun, and by the loss of centrifugal force attendant upon their confused slowing they, too, would without doubt be drawn into the path of one or the other of the separating suns and perish in them. And even Uranus would meet a doom as inevitable, since with a distance of two billion miles between them the two new suns would be resting almost exactly upon Uranus' orbit, and so that world too would go to blazing death in one or the other of them. "But Neptune would not! For Neptune, farther out than Uranus, farthest out of all the planets, would be the one planet in the solar system that would escape the tremendous cataclysm, due to its distance from the sun. When the two suns separated, Neptune's orbit would probably change a little, it would probably sweep closer in toward those suns for some distance, but except for that it would be unchanged, and would by reason of its great distance continue to circle in its curving path through space, but would circle then around these two new suns instead of around the former single sun. And with those two suns separated as they were, by a distance of two billion miles, Neptune would be near always to one of those suns, because it would undoubtedly sweep nearer to them when the cataclysm occurred, and would take up an elliptical orbit about them with the two suns as the foci of that ellipse. Thus it would always be near enough one of them to gain from it or from both a large amount of heat! For not only would Neptune in its elliptical orbit be far, far closer to them thus, but the other planets hurtling into them would tend to make them hotter. Thus Neptune, revolving close about the two suns, would gain from them the warm, life-giving heat that it had never gained from the single sun!