Page:The evolution of worlds - Lowell.djvu/49

Rh increased speed of rotation due to contraction upon itself, parts of its periphery should be shed continually and a pinwheel of matter, not a two-armed spiral, be thrown off. If explosion were the disintegrating cause, disruption would occur unsymmetrically in one or more directions, not symmetrically as here.

As the stranger passed on, his effect would diminish until his attraction no longer overbalanced that of the body for its disrupted portions. These might then be controlled and forced to move in elliptic orbits about the mass of which they had originally made part. Thence would come into being a solar system, the knots in the nebula going to form the planets that were to be.

Before proceeding to what proof we have that it actually did occur in this way we may pause to consider some consequences of what we have already learned. Thus what brought about the beginning of the system may also compass its end. If one random encounter took place in the past, a second is as likely to occur in the future. Another celestial body may any day run into the Sun, and it is to a dark body that we must look for such destruction, because they are so much more numerous in space.

That any of the lucent stars, the stars commonly so called, could collide with the Sun, or come near enough to amount to the same thing, is demonstrably impossible for æons of years. But this is far from the case