Page:The Solar System - Six Lectures - Lowell.djvu/152



But though we cannot as yet review with the mind's eye our past, we can, to an extent, foresee our future. We can with scientific confidence look forward to a time when each of the bodies composing the solar system shall turn an unchanging face in perpetuity to the Sun. Each will then have reached the end of its evolution, set in the unchanging stare of death.

Then the Sun itself will go out, becoming a cold and lifeless mass; and the solar system will circle unseen, ghostlike, in space, awaiting only the resurrection of another cosmic catastrophe.