Excerpt from Cosmos, Vol. 4: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, Part 1

If already, in the course of the last volume, in passing from the consideration of the heaven of the fixed stars - in which countless suns shine either singly, or revolving round each other, or are known to us only as constituting the faint light of distant nebulae, - we felt the transition to our own planetary system to be a descent from the great and universal to the relatively small and special, the field of contemplation becomes restricted within yet far narrower limits, in passing, as we are now to do, from the totality of the varied solar system to one only of the planets which circle round its central luminary. The distance of the nearest of the fixed stars, a Centauri, is still 263 times greater than the dia meter Oi the solar system taken to the aphelion of the comet of 1680, and yet the latter distance 1s itself 853 times greater than that of our Earth from the Sun. (kosmos, Bd. Iii. S. 582, Engl. P. These numbers (in which the parallax of a Centauri is taken at O'9187) assign approximately the distance Of a comparatively near region of sidereal space from the conjectured outermost limit of the solar system, and the distance of this latter limit from the Earth.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.