Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/303

Rh to show a disk. The point image of a distant star must be studied as an integrated whole; whereas the sun may be observed in considerable geometrical detail. We can not hope to understand the stars in general until we have first made a thorough study of our own star.

We are unable to study the body of the sun, except by indirect methods. The interior is invisible. The spherical body which we popularly speak of as the sun is hidden from view by the opaque photosphere. This photospheric veil, including the sun spots; the brilliant faculæ and flocculi, projecting upward from the photosphere; the reversing layer, in effect immediately overlying the photosphere; the chromosphere, a stratum associated with and overlying the reversing layer; the prominences, apparently ejected from the chromosphere; and the corona, extending outward from the sun in all directions to enormous distances; these superlatively interesting features of the sun constitute the only portions accessible for direct observation; and they are an insignificant part of its mass. They are literally the sun's outcasts. Our knowledge of the sun is based almost exclusively upon a study of these outcasts. Nevertheless, we are able to formulate a fairly simple and satisfactory theory of its constitution.

The materials composing the sun appear to be the same as those forming the earth's crust. Of the eighty known elements, slightly more than half have been observed in the reversing layer and chromosphere, by means of their spectra. The existence of others remains unproved, but there are no reasons to doubt that they too are present. Our most complete study of the sun's composition was made by Rowland, and he has said that if the earth were heated to the temperature of the sun, the terrestrial and solar spectra would be virtually identical.

The force of gravity at the sun's surface is well known, but the radial pressures at interior points are somewhat uncertain, as they depend upon the unknown law of increasing density with increasing depth. The minimum value of the pressure at the sun's center is thought to be fully ten thousand million times the pressure of our atmosphere at sea-level. The most probable value of the effective temperature of the sun's radiating surface is 6000° Centigrade, and the minimum value for the center is perhaps five million degrees. In view of these high temperatures, and the low average density of the sun, the interior must be largely gaseous, and perhaps entirely so; although, under the stupendous pressures, a great central core is probably of a viscous consistency, but ready to assume the usual properties of a gas when the convection currents carry the viscous masses up into regions of lower pressure.

The surface strata are radiating heat into surrounding space. To maintain the supply, it is imperative that convection currents should carry the cooled masses down into the interior, and bring corresponding hot masses up to the surface. These currents make the sun a very