Reno Evening Gazette Tuesday, January 12, 1886 Page: Front Meteoric Stones WHERE DO THEY COME FROM TO EARTH? The falling of the huge one in Western Pennsylvanie recently - a stone as large as an average house - seems to have excited some interest on the part of many persons to learn something more about these strange and dangerous visitors. It is rare that we hear of one of such great size as this Pennsylvania meteor; indeed, one may well question the truth of the account. But there have been even larger ones, though not, probably, in modern times. The theory of some persons, that these red-hot stones have been thrown out of some volcano, and then been drawn back to the earth's surface by gravitation, is wholly untenable. These fiery rocks come from "other worlds than ours." It is not probable that they are recent emanations from one of the other planets; they are drawn, in all probability, by the earth's great attraction, out of their place in some of the great meteor streams that revolve, like the earth, around the sun, each in its own orbit. At certain points in the annual journeys of our own world and of these great streams of loosely aggregated rocks of many sizes, the two orbits evidently so nearly touch as to make it possible for the globe on which we live to capture some of the meteoric bodies which constitute the fringe, or skirt, so to speak, of the meteor stream. Once, on the 13th of November, 1833, our globe must have brushed through the thinner outer fringe of the astonishing aggregation which has since come to be known among astromoners as the "November stream," in contradistinction to another whose skirts we almost touch in August, and which is called, therefore, the "August stream." Other streams may exist, in the interplanetary spaces, of which the astromers have no positive knowledge; or, there may be irregular masses, or even endless cases of separate meteoric bodies, all rushing around the sun in different orbits. It is certain that countless millions of these objects, mostly quite small bodies, are actually drawn in upon the earth. Most of them, apparently, are burned up before reaching the earth's surface, and descent in an invisible, impalpable form of exceedingly fine dust. Occasionally this can be plainly seen - as it was once, in the suburbs of this city, some time ago, when it seemed at first, shown against the afternoon sun, like a real shower of rain, only a rain from a clear sky, but which proved to be a shower of dust, so fine, that unless it chanced to be seen against the sun, it as invisible. Mr. Proctor, the astronomer, holds this unseen falling meteoric dust to have been an appreciable, indeed an important, factor involved in the problem of the alleged growth of the bulk of our planet, and has actually tried to compute something of the rate and extent of that supposed increase. However, that may be, our globe certainly does capture an anormous number of little foreign bodies. One or more can be seen silently straming across the sky on almost any clear, calm night; sometimes a number of them - their seeming course across the sky, instead of plunging straight down, being merely an optical effect, due to the angle at which the appearance in seen. These meteors, entering the earth's atmosphere, and plunging with more and more velocity as they get nearer the surface, are heated to a white heat (and thus made luminous and visible) by the increased friction and the increased density of the air. Most of them appear literally "burnt up," but some, usually the larger ones, hold out against their own conflagration till they burst with a great explosion, or plunger intact (but red-hot) into the ground - or the sea. Without giving credence to the Western story, a few years ago, of a man being killed by one of these meteors, there is still some small degree of likelihood that such a thing might happen; a much lesser chance than the danger of being struck by lightning. The August train of meteors in computed to be 90,000,000 miles long - or about as long as the distance from the earth to the sun. Others are of unknown length. Where do they originate? The question is easily asked. The answer, while it is one about which we feel but little doubt, seems to be not susceptible of being sustained by actual proof. These meteoric bodies appear to be not exactly like any of our rocks. Many of them are more like a kind of half-vitreous "iron stone" than anything else; they show the work of heat, and ring, on being struck by a hammer. - (Hartford Times) |
