Page:The Urantia Book, 1st Edition.djvu/526

460 forms of matter explain how even nonsolid suns can attain a density equal to iron—about the same as Urantia—and yet be in a highly heated gaseous state and continue to function as suns. The atoms in these dense supergases are exceptionally small; they contain few electrons. Such suns have also largely lost their free ultimatonic stores of energy.

One of your near-by suns, which started life with about the same mass as yours, has now contracted almost to the size of Urantia, having become sixty thousand times as dense as your sun. The weight of this hot-cold gaseous-solid is about one ton per cubic inch. And still this sun shines with a faint reddish glow, the senile glimmer of a dying monarch of light.

Most of the suns, however, are not so dense. One of your nearer neighbors has a density exactly equal to that of your atmosphere at sea level. If you were in the interior of this sun, you would be unable to discern anything. And temperature permitting, you could penetrate the majority of the suns which twinkle in the night sky and notice no more matter than you perceive in the air of your earthly living rooms.

The massive sun of Veluntia, one of the largest in Orvonton, has a density only one one-thousandth that of Urantia's atmosphere. Were it in composition similar to your atmosphere and not superheated, it would be such a vacuum that human beings would speedily suffocate if they were in or on it.

Another of the Orvonton giants now has a surface temperature a trifle under three thousand degrees. Its diameter is over three hundred million miles—ample room to accommodate your sun and the present orbit of the earth. And yet, for all this enormous size, over forty million times that of your sun, its mass is only about thirty times greater. These enormous suns have an extending fringe that reaches almost from one to the other.

That the suns of space are not very dense is proved by the steady streams of escaping light-energies. Too great a density would retain light by opacity until the light-energy pressure reached the explosion point. There is a tremendous light or gas pressure within a sun to cause it to shoot forth such a stream of energy as to penetrate space for millions upon millions of miles to energize, light, and heat the distant planets. Fifteen feet of surface of the density of Urantia would effectually prevent the escape of all X rays and light-energies from a sun until the rising internal pressure of accumulating energies resulting from atomic dismemberment overcame gravity with a tremendous outward explosion.

Light, in the presence of the propulsive gases, is highly explosive when confined at high temperatures by opaque retaining walls. Light is real. As you value energy and power on your world, sunlight would be economical at a million dollars a pound.

The interior of your sun is a vast X-ray generator. The suns are supported from within by the incessant bombardment of these mighty emanations.

It requires more than one-half million years for an X-ray-stimulated electron to work its way from the very center of an average sun up to the solar surface, whence it starts out on its space adventure, maybe to warm an inhabited planet, to be captured by a meteor, to participate in the birth of an atom, to be attracted by a highly charged dark island of space, or to find its space flight terminated by a final plunge into the surface of a sun similar to the one of its origin.