> The Childrens Encyclopedia, страница 1 > The cloud that Is beginning to be a sun like ours

The cloud that Is beginning to be a sun like ours

What we call- empty space is not empty; it is full of an invisible wonderful something we call ether, and it is this ether which conveys light to us, and tells us. of the house across the street, of the suns millions of miles away, of the friend; across the room. Now at places in space something miraculous seems to be going on in the ether.

We see a glowing cloud, millions of miles in diameter, which has blossomed in the invisible ether. It certainly was not always there, and if it were not always there some Power must have made it. God made it. He is.beginning to make it into a sun. When astronomers examine such a cloud with telescopes and spectroscopes they discover that it is composed chiefly of the two gases, hydrogen and helium.

That does not seem very wonderful, but chemists have found that all the elements in the world are built up of atoms of these two light gases. In the cloud, hydrogen and helium are being prepared to make all the other elements that go to make suns and planets. At this stage the cloud is very thin, thinner even than the air we breathe; but as the gases form, and as new elements are constructed, the cloud contracts,or shrinks, and grows denser and hotter. The chemical processes going, on, and the shrinking of the cloud, both produce great heat, and so the cloud becomes a blazing sun like ours.