Page:In the high heavens.djvu/222

 could not have been the result of chance, Laplace sought to investigate its probable cause. This cause, he thought, could be nothing else than the atmosphere of the sun, which once extended so far out as to fill all the space now occupied by the planets. He conceives the immense vaporous mass forming the sun and his atmosphere to have had a slow rotation on its axis. The mass, being intensely hot, would slowly cool off, and as it did so, would contract towards the centre. As it contracted its velocity would, in obedience to one of the fundamental laws of mechanics, constantly increase, so that a time would arrive when, at the outer boundary of the mass, the centrifugal force due to the rotation would counterbalance the attractive force of the central mass. Then those outer portions would be left behind as a revolving ring, while the next inner portions would continue to contract, until at their boundary the centrifugal and attractive forces would be again balanced, when a second ring would be left behind; and so on. Thus, instead of a continuous atmosphere, the sun would be surrounded by a series of concentric revolving rings of vapour.

"Now, how would these rings of vapour behave? As they cooled off, their denser materials would condense first, and thus the ring would be composed of a mixed mass, partly solid and partly vaporous, the quantity of solid matter constantly increasing and that of vapour diminishing. If the ring were perfectly uniform this condensing process would take place equally all around it, and the ring would thus be broken up into a group of small planets like that which we see between Mars and Jupiter. But we should expect that, in general, some portions of the ring would be much denser than others,