As to dark nebul? which may possibly
lie in the track that the solar system is pursuing at the rate of
375,000,000 miles per year, that is another question -- and they, too,
could be dangerous!
This brings us directly back to ``Nova Persei,'' for among the many
suggestions offered to explain its outburst, as well as those of other
temporary stars, one of the most fruitful is that of a collision
between a star and a vast invisible nebula. Professor Seeliger, of
Munich, first proposed this theory, but it afterward underwent some
modifications from others. Stated in a general form, the idea is that
a huge dark body, perhaps an extinguished sun, encountered in its
progress through space a widespread flock of small meteors forming a
dark nebula. As it plunged into the swarm the friction of the
innumerable collisions with the meteors heated its surface to
incandescence, and being of vast size it then became visible to us as
a new star. Meanwhile the motion of the body through the nebula, and
its rotation upon itself, set up a gyration in the blazing atmosphere
formed around it by the vaporized meteors; and as this atmosphere
spread wider, under the laws of gyratory motion a rotation in the
opposite direction began in the inflamed meteoric cloud outside the
central part of the vortex.
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