Page:A short history of astronomy(1898).djvu/501

§§ 318, 319] separation of bodies which attract one another, as well as in various electrical, chemical, and other ways. With this discovery was closely connected the general theory known as the conservation of energy, according to which energy, though capable of many transformations, can neither be increased nor decreased in quantity. A body which, like the sun, is giving out heat and light is accordingly thereby losing energy, and is like a machine doing work; either then it is receiving energy from some other source to compensate this loss or its store of energy is diminishing. But a body which goes on indefinitely giving out heat and light without having its store of energy replenished is exactly analogous to a machine which goes on working indefinitely without any motive power to drive it; and both are alike impossible.

The results obtained by John Herschel and Pouillet in 1836 (§ 307) called attention to the enormous expenditure of the sun in the form of heat, and astronomers thus had to face the problem of explaining how the sun was able to go on radiating heat and light in this way. Neither in the few thousand years of the past covered by historic records, nor in the enormously great periods of which geologists and biologists take account, is there any evidence of any important permanent alteration in the amount of heat and light received annually by the earth from the sun. Any theory of the sun's heat must therefore be able to account for the continual expenditure of heat at something like the present rate for an immense period of time. The obvious explanation of the sun as a furnace deriving its heat from combustion is found to be totally inadequate when put to the test of figures, as the sun could in this way be kept going at most for a few thousand years. The explanation now generally accepted was first given by the great German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) in a popular lecture in 1854. The sun possesses an immense store of energy in the form of the mutual gravitation of its parts; if from any cause it shrinks, a certain amount of gravitational energy is necessarily lost and takes some other form. In the shrinkage of the sun we have therefore a possible source of energy. The precise amount of energy liberated by a definite amount of shrinkage of the sun depends upon