p. 170 | The Falling Stars by D. T. T.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 16, 1871

The Falling Stars.

By D. T. T.

The star of the Bible may or may not be the star of modern science. Nevertheless, the difference is only nominal. For the latter makes a distinction between the greater and lesser lights of the heavens, and variously denominates them suns, worlds, planets, asteroids, comets, meteors, aerolites, etc. But in the sacred Scriptures, the word star, as a general term, covers all these except the sun and the moon. If the inspired writer would designate the Deity as the Creator of all things, he simply declares, “He made the stars also.” If a prophet king views the distant worlds that stud the midnight concave, he speaks of them as “the stars which Thou hast made.” If an immense bolide or aerolite falls blazing upon the earth, it is described as “a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp.” If a meteor is seen flashing and suddenly consumed, it is set forth as “a wandering star reserved for blackness and darkness forever.” If a cometary mass is divinely directed to appear to the eyes of men, to move through the air, and finally to stand still over the place of the Redeemer’s birth, this is the “star in the east,” the famous star of Bethlehem. Only one other solution of this wonderful narrative is possible; namely, the view of Dr. Whitby, who supposed the star of Bethlehem was an angelic being (sometimes called a star) enveloped in a cloud of light. Again, if aerolites in great numbers fall on the armies of the foes of Israel, we are told that “the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” This language of the sacred historian, recorded in Judges, has long been a puzzle to the critics, and afforded some mirth to the skeptical. For what had the stars to do with the warfare of contending nations? And how, even in a poetical sense, could the stars be said to fight? Or does the passage exhibit a belief in judicial astrology? Nay, but Deborah was simply describing a shower of aerolites upon the army of Sisera. Only this, and nothing more. Once more, if the meteorites are beheld flung toward our globe in countless myriads, we are told of it beforehand in the vision of the seer, who says, “The stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.” This language has by many been understood metaphorically. But there is no need of thus interpreting it. The great “star showers” of the present age abundantly fulfill the sublime and graphic prediction; a token foretold also by our Lord himself, when he asserts in another place that “the stars shall fall from heaven.” No human language could so exactly describe in few words the magnificent meteoric exhibitions of the last seventy-five years. Hence the Scriptures speak with scientific accuracy when they tell us about the “stars.”

The sun numbers among his attendants not only planets and comets, but multitudes of meteors, aerolites, and nebulous masses also, of which the solar system is full. All these little bodies are in motion; and whenever they rush within the sphere of the superior attraction of the earth, and their substance is enveloped in flames by reason of their fierce, quick contact with the earth’s enveloping air, all scientific authority calls them “shooting stars,” falling stars, &c. Outside this atmosphere the meteoric “star,” whether weighing but an ounce, as many do, or whether as large and as heavy as a mountain, is non-luminous. It only becomes visible to the eye by the ignition of its substance (largely composed of nickel and iron) in the act of passing into the atmosphere. The millions of these distributed throughout the interplanetary spaces are slowly being lapped up by the earth, the planets, and the sun. Meteorites are but the products of dissolution—dead stars dashed in pieces and seeking a grave, and a comet is only a gigantic meteor, in Scripture language, “a wandering star.” Is it any wonder that the Bible, which names everything in heaven and earth, spiritual and material, should repeatedly refer to the falling stars?

The world of mankind will never forget the three great star-shower epochs of 1799, 1833, and 1866. Once in a generation and thrice in a century it would appear as if an invisible deity enthroned in some other world was for our crimes bombarding the planet we live upon. Happy for the race is it that the Creator has ordained for the earth a cuirass, a circumambient shield that catches the flying missiles of destruction, and consumes them into nothing ere they reach the abodes of men. Were this otherwise, the ponderous stones, the iron masses and fire-balls rained down at times more thickly than the Prussians rained bombs on doomed Paris, and with which the aerial spaces, like inexhaustible mortars, are ever full, would hurl terrible ruin upon the land. And no earthly opposing force could resist their onset. These star-stones are, of various sizes—from a tiny lump of meteoric iron up to a planetoid of a mile in diameter. The larger the stones, the greater the danger. Indeed, the contact of some that have fallen within a brief period in the past, reminds one of the Miltonian conflict of the angels who threw the everlasting bolts at one another. “Is it quite impossible,” asks the London Times, “that some day the earth may have to encounter more bulky metal, more comparable to our mundane artillery? Showers of stones there have been; and there evidently is no limit to their size, either in history or in science, for the laws which govern the movement of every body in our solar system apply equally to all sizes and all substances, from this earth to a grain of dust—from a mass of metal to a vapor. Here is a shower of missiles of unknown weight and inconceivable velocity, always in motion from some unknown battery, and every human generation has to run the gauntlet. Will this atmosphere of ours always prove an absolute protection, and turn off these bolts as merit is said to do the shafts of envy and destruction? That is a question at least to be thought of.” Is this alarm groundless? At the risk of being thought superstitious, we venture to inquire, Does not the solemn language of the Revelation, which speaks of great hail out of heaven (chapter 16, verse 21), intimate a future catastrophe of a like kind? The root of the word rendered “hailstones,” denotes a shining substance, and may signify a luminous, fiery body, as well as frozen rain. The awful text, viewed as foretelling a visible reality, has perplexed the commentators; but science discovers the elements by which this plague, more dreadful than the great stones hurled upon the armies of the Amorites, can be literally brought about. The actualization of such a scene is not altogether within the realm of the imagination, as we shall presently show.

As already hinted, there is some proof that aerolites of increased size are encountering the earth. In such case, the aerial elastic cushion that breaks their fall earthward may not always prove invulnerable and serve to burn up and shatter these stone-stars in their flight through it by the resistless friction and the heat evolved. Now the flying earth and the flying meteors collide with a velocity of full forty miles a second. Sometimes the aerial barrier is entirely overcome, and the stones fall into the ocean or upon the land. Since the earliest recorded shower of stones, more than 3300 years ago, over five hundred such showers have been registered. And these little asteroids, as we may call them, have killed more than one human being on the face of our globe. They have destroyed sailors on ship board at sea, and men, women, and animals, on land—dashing down from the sky with a fearful noise, like the discharge of musketry or like the thundering of cannon. The earth has been penetrated by them to a depth of twenty feet. Roofs of buildings and straw in yards have been set on fire by stones that fell hissing with a white heat, and shining with a dazzling brilliancy. Chimneys have been thrown down by the mere concussion, and the earth jarred so powerfully as to give the impression of an earthquake—the skies crashing with unheard-of sound, producing alarm and terror among men. Indeed, their fall has given to some a startling conception of the possible reality of the famed poetic idea of a “wreck of nature and a crash of worlds,” for trees have been dashed to the earth, rocks split asunder and crumbled to atoms, and surrounding hills made to quiver at their fall.

Yale College has a specimen of meteoric iron that weighs 1625 pounds. In the Imperial Museum at St. Petersburg may be seen an aerolite weighing 1680 pounds. One fell in Tennessee in the summer of 1868 computed to weigh five or six tons. It was intensely hot and buried itself in the earth over a rod in depth. On a plain in Buenos Ayres is seen a meteoric mass of iron and nickel weighing fifteen tons. A meteoric body of 600,000 tons weight passed within twenty-five miles of the earth in Europe with a velocity of twenty miles a second. A fragment of it reached the earth. A similar body of a diameter of half a mile passed over the United States in July, 1860. More than two thousand stones, smoking with heat, fell from the sky in Normandy in 1803. Humboldt says three thousand have fallen at a single shower. These constitute samples of what might occur on a larger scale. In the summer of 1868, a year memorable for gigantic terrestrial convulsions, a bolide of immense proportions was discovered in the heavens over the city of Warsaw in Poland. At the very outskirts of the atmosphere, at a distance of 400 miles away, its size appeared to be as great as the moon at its full. It was estimated to possess a surface of two thousand acres, and its explosion at a height of fifty miles was accompanied by a noise and shock such as had never been heard or felt before in the city. There is no record anciently of stones of such immense size issuing from the sky. Millions of pieces fell all over the earth in Poland, and thousands were collected and are preserved in the academies of Europe. When this bolide burst its entire surface must have been in flame. It is probable that the resistance of the atmosphere proved too great for this “meteoric planet,” as Nichol would call it, and the contact shattered it into atoms. Had it fallen intact upon the city, the news of the appalling catastrophe would have caused the ears of the nation to tingle. Its diameter was nearly a mile, and if we compare it with the asteroid Hestia, which is but fifteen miles in diameter, its immense magnitude is better appreciated. Just think of more than one million six hundred thousand similar bodies, large and small, rushing out of their unknown and unseen hiding places down furiously upon the earth’s atmospheric shield every year. Such is the calculation of science. In the light of the fact there is truly renewed occasion for thankfulness to a merciful Heaven for the air man breathes. In more than one way would its absence prove his ruin. Kirkwood thinks the aerolites were more numerous in ancient times than now. If this could be proved there is yet evidence that those recently reaching the earth are of larger size. And the latter may be argued from scientific reasons.

But why do these stones either break in pieces or burn up in the air? We reply, it has been shown that a solid body moving through the air at a velocity of thirty miles a second, would evolve heat equal to 2,500,000° Fahrenheit. This is a hundred times swifter than a cannon ball, and two thousand times hotter than a red hot iron. As the earth is moving through space at the rate of about nineteen miles a second, and the falling stars are flying toward it with an equal and probably a superior velocity, the rush of speed with which the two come together is inconceivably great. A white heat is instantly evolved in the meteor, and it assumes an intense brightness. Thus its headlong haste proves its own destruction, but insures man’s salvation. It is not impossible but there may be immense accumulations of carbureted hydrogen stored in the higher regions of the atmosphere which assists the plunging aerolite suddenly to ignite, and which renders its combustion more certain. And is it not possibly true that this inflammable gas, heaped up as it were on the back of the air and traversed by the solar electric fluid, may in some way cause in part the varied lights and colors of the auroral meteor? It is a matter certainly worth investigating.

There is everywhere this side of Neptune a rush of matter sun-ward. Assuredly, he is ruler, light, and fire. Armstrong and others assert that some day the whole system of planets, with all bodies that belong to them, will find their fiery grave in the great central and intensely heated luminary. The notion is worth repeating here, but we don’t believe it. Nevertheless we all know that planets, asteroids, comets, and meteors, are drawn by mysterious force that way. But while the earth may and does swallow up the meteors, we think it will have a better destiny than to be itself gulped down by the sun.

This brings us to consider the question of the final extinction of the whole tribe of falling stars.

Many astronomers think the sun’s eternal fires are fed by meteors, and that these constitute its only fuel. The larger masses of the solar system are undoubtedly gradually absorbing the smaller ones. The meteoric nebulæ which thus constantly encounter the sun and planets, and which are but the dust of the wide system, must at last disappear, unless some new and at present unknown supplies are found in other shattered, disintegrated and ungathered orbs. Meteoric dust and cometary particles are daily reaching the earth’s surface. No less than four thousand five hundred aerolites are, by Reichenbach, estimated to fall to our earth every twenty-four hours, three-fourths of them, of course descending into the ocean. These are of every size, from the weight of less than an ounce to bodies of fifteen tons. Of visible “shooting stars,” a little over seven and a half millions fall into our atmosphere every day. But the visible stars, discovered only by the telescope, that fall daily to our earth and are henceforth swallowed up and incorporated in it, are computed at the enormous number of four hundred millions. Colbert calculates the annual increase of the earth by starry matter falling into it to be one hundred and eighty tons, and he says the planet Mercury is increased yearly about 600 tons from similar matter. It is claimed that the weight and bulk of Mercury is so considerably increased thereby as to retard his mean motion. The earth, too, must also be slightly enlarged in size, as the figures would show an increase of more than a million of tons in six thousand years. Is it not possible that her progress is also retarded thereby, and that we are on the eve of a vast climatic change? And how does this perpetual rain of matter affect the atmosphere?

Inevitable results must necessarily follow this consumption of the meteors by the sun and planets. In time they must all disappear. We shall then have reached the end of the falling stars. It has been discovered that the November meteoric cloud, or starry stream, through which the earth plunges every thirty-three and a third years is a belt of small asteroidal bodies moving elliptically, and following or accompanying a comet, which comet has the same orbit as the meteors. The comet of 1866 was, therefore, only a very large meteor of the November stream of falling stars. Indeed, the comet is only the huge king-meteor of the countless meteoric tribe. The latter are but the debris of ancient comets now broken up into smaller pieces and distributed around their elliptical orbits. The ring is cosmical in its kind, and traverses the interplanetary spaces with its comet leader in the form of an elongated belt. The stream of little stars on its long travel passes near the great planet Uranus, and is deflected from its path by the powerful attraction of the latter. Whirling around its turning point, it returns again in thirty-three years to the earth, and is also deflected from its path by our globe, which rushes right through the starry belt. The belt of November falling stars is thus shown to have its perihelion at the orbit of the earth, and its aphelion at the orbit of Uranus, more than seventeen hundred millions of miles away. For centuries this stream of meteors has periodically flung its particles by myriads into the planet Uranus, and into the bosom of the earth. How many other comets absorb it, or how many other huge orbs seize upon it and swallow it up, as big fish swallow up smaller ones, we do not know. Hence millions on millions of these meteors have disappeared from the original moving stream. They fall upon the earth’s air for nations to gaze at and to wonder whence they come. And there must be star showers also at far-off Uranus for its inhabitants to witness, if any such exist in that frozen orb. In the sun and earth and Uranus the November meteors are finding their grave. Of what use are dead stars but to be buried, and by the solemn splendor of their burial to herald the consummation when all that’s mutable and dying in creation shall be made new and glorious?

We are now told that of the August group of meteors but few were seen last year, either in Great Britain or in the United States. And at last we have passed through and by the November belt. So few were the periodical falling stars of November, 1870, as hardly to pay for a night’s watching to witness and count them; though the English astronomers had announced that a vast number would fall, as the earth, it was thought, would pass through a very deep portion of the starry zone. But the stars were not there, and for once the students of the heavens were at fault. At Burlington, N. J., only eleven were seen; at Brunswick, Me., only sixty-six. At New Haven, Conn., only sixty-eight were seen, where no less than seven thousand were witnessed in 1867, and two hundred and forty thousand were estimated to fall in 1833. One hypothesis is that the stream ran by sooner than was expected, or that in some way the earth missed it. Our hypothesis is that the cloud is getting exhausted. This cloud or stream was imagined by the astronomers to be double in depth to the space between us and the moon. Their unaccountable absence in 1870 proves this estimate to have been too great, or else the great stream has become greatly diminished since a third of a century ago. Biela’s comet passed very near and perhaps through the November meteor stream in December, 1845. Since that time the comet has appeared divided in twain, and exhibits two parts. Did the comet scatter the starry ring, or in part attach it to its tail? It may be thus partly diverted from its orbit, or partly swallowed up by the comet of Biela. At any rate, we have bidden a long farewell to the magnificent flying belt of atomic stars. The sacred word has for the thousandth time proved true, and the prediction of the King of all worlds that “the stars shall fall from Heaven,” is accomplished.—D. T. T., in Boston Journal.