Physical Aspects of the Local Universe

41:3.1There are up­ward of two thou­sand bril­liant suns pour­ing forth light and en­ergy in Sa­ta­nia, and your own sun is an av­er­age blaz­ing orb. Of the thirty suns near­est yours, only three are brighter. The Uni­verse Power Di­rec­tors ini­ti­ate the spe­cial­ized cur­rents of en­ergy which play be­tween the in­di­vid­ual stars and their re­spec­tive sys­tems. These so­lar fur­naces, to­gether with the dark gi­ants of space, serve the power cen­ters and phys­i­cal con­trol­lers as way sta­tions for the ef­fec­tive con­cen­trat­ing and di­rec­tion­iz­ing of the en­ergy cir­cuits of the ma­te­rial cre­ations.

41:3.2The suns of Neb­a­don are not un­like those of other uni­verses. The ma­te­rial com­po­si­tion of all suns, dark is­lands, plan­ets, and satel­lites, even me­te­ors, is quite iden­ti­cal. These suns have an av­er­age di­am­e­ter of about one mil­lion miles, that of your own so­lar orb be­ing slightly less. The largest star in the uni­verse, the stel­lar cloud Antares, is four hun­dred and fifty times the di­am­e­ter of your sun and is sixty mil­lion times its vol­ume. But there is abun­dant space to ac­com­mo­date all of these enor­mous suns. They have just as much com­par­a­tive el­bow room in space as one dozen or­anges would have if they were cir­cu­lat­ing about through­out the in­te­rior of Uran­tia, and were the planet a hol­low globe.

41:3.3When suns that are too large are thrown off a neb­u­lar mother wheel, they soon break up or form dou­ble stars. All suns are orig­i­nally truly gaseous, though they may later tran­siently ex­ist in a semiliq­uid state. When your sun at­tained this quasi-liq­uid state of super­gas pres­sure, it was not suf­fi­ciently large to split equa­to­ri­ally, this be­ing one type of dou­ble star for­ma­tion.

41:3.4When less than one tenth the size of your sun, these fiery spheres rapidly con­tract, con­dense, and cool. When up­wards of thirty times its size—rather thirty times the gross con­tent of ac­tual ma­te­rial—suns read­ily split into two sep­a­rate bod­ies, ei­ther be­com­ing the cen­ters of new sys­tems or else re­main­ing in each other’s grav­ity grasp and re­volv­ing about a com­mon cen­ter as one type of dou­ble star.

41:3.5The most re­cent of the ma­jor cos­mic erup­tions in Or­von­ton was the ex­traor­di­nary dou­ble star ex­plo­sion, the light of which reached Uran­tia in A.D. 1572. This con­fla­gra­tion was so in­tense that the ex­plo­sion was clearly vis­i­ble in broad day­light.

41:3.6Not all stars are solid, but many of the older ones are. Some of the red­dish, faintly glim­mer­ing stars have ac­quired a den­sity at the cen­ter of their enor­mous masses which would be ex­pressed by say­ing that one cu­bic inch of such a star, if on Uran­tia, would weigh six thou­sand pounds. The enor­mous pres­sure, ac­com­pa­nied by loss of heat and cir­cu­lat­ing en­ergy, has re­sulted in bring­ing the or­bits of the ba­sic ma­te­rial units closer and closer to­gether un­til they now closely ap­proach the sta­tus of elec­tronic con­den­sa­tion. This pro­cess of cool­ing and con­trac­tion may con­tinue to the lim­it­ing and crit­i­cal ex­plo­sion point of ul­ti­ma­tonic con­den­sa­tion.

41:3.7Most of the gi­ant suns are rel­a­tively young; most of the dwarf stars are old, but not all. The col­li­sional dwarfs may be very young and may glow with an in­tense white light, never hav­ing known an ini­tial red stage of youth­ful shin­ing. Both very young and very old suns usu­ally shine with a red­dish glow. The yel­low tinge in­di­cates mod­er­ate youth or ap­proach­ing old age, but the bril­liant white light sig­ni­fies ro­bust and ex­tended adult life.

41:3.8While all ado­les­cent suns do not pass through a pul­sat­ing stage, at least not vis­i­bly, when look­ing out into space you may ob­serve many of these younger stars whose gi­gan­tic res­pi­ra­tory heaves re­quire from two to seven days to com­plete a cy­cle. Your own sun still car­ries a di­min­ish­ing legacy of the mighty up­swellings of its younger days, but the pe­riod has length­ened from the for­mer three and one-half day pul­sa­tions to the pres­ent eleven and one-half year sun­spot cy­cles.

41:3.9Stel­lar vari­ables have nu­mer­ous ori­gins. In some dou­ble stars the tides caused by rapidly chang­ing dis­tances as the two bod­ies swing around their or­bits also oc­ca­sion pe­ri­odic fluc­tu­a­tions of light. These grav­ity vari­a­tions pro­duce reg­u­lar and re­cur­rent flares, just as the cap­ture of me­te­ors by the ac­cre­tion of en­ergy-ma­te­rial at the sur­face would re­sult in a com­par­a­tively sud­den flash of light which would speed­ily re­cede to nor­mal bright­ness for that sun. Some­times a sun will cap­ture a stream of me­te­ors in a line of less­ened grav­ity op­po­si­tion, and oc­ca­sion­ally col­li­sions cause stel­lar flare-ups, but the ma­jor­ity of such phe­nom­ena are wholly due to in­ter­nal fluc­tu­a­tions.

41:3.10In one group of vari­able stars the pe­riod of light fluc­tu­a­tion is di­rectly de­pen­dent on lu­mi­nos­ity, and knowl­edge of this fact en­ables as­tron­o­mers to uti­lize such suns as uni­verse light­houses or ac­cu­rate mea­sur­ing points for the fur­ther ex­plo­ration of dis­tant star clus­ters. By this tech­nique it is pos­si­ble to mea­sure stel­lar dis­tances most pre­cisely up to more than one mil­lion light-years. Bet­ter meth­ods of space mea­sure­ment and im­proved tele­scopic tech­nique will some­time more fully dis­close the ten grand di­vi­sions of the super­uni­verse of Or­von­ton; you will at least rec­og­nize eight of these im­mense sec­tors as enor­mous and fairly sym­met­ri­cal star clus­ters.