Physical Aspects of the Local Universe

41:4.1The mass of your sun is slightly greater than the es­ti­mate of your physi­cists, who have reck­oned it as about two oc­til­lion (2×10²⁷) tons. It now ex­ists about half­way be­tween the most dense and the most dif­fuse stars, hav­ing about one and one-half times the den­sity of wa­ter. But your sun is nei­ther a liq­uid nor a solid—it is gaseous—and this is true not­with­stand­ing the dif­fi­culty of ex­plain­ing how gaseous mat­ter can at­tain this and even much greater den­si­ties.

41:4.2Gaseous, liq­uid, and solid states are mat­ters of atomic-molec­u­lar re­la­tion­ships, but den­sity is a re­la­tion­ship of space and mass. Den­sity varies di­rectly with the quan­tity of mass in space and in­versely with the amount of space in mass, the space be­tween the cen­tral cores of mat­ter and the par­ti­cles which whirl around these cen­ters as well as the space within such ma­te­rial par­ti­cles.

41:4.3Cool­ing stars can be phys­i­cally gaseous and tremen­dously dense at the same time. You are not fa­mil­iar with the so­lar super­gases, but these and other un­usual forms of mat­ter ex­plain how even non­solid suns can at­tain a den­sity equal to iron—about the same as Uran­tia—and yet be in a highly heated gaseous state and con­tinue to func­tion as suns. The atoms in these dense super­gases are ex­cep­tion­ally small; they con­tain few elec­trons. Such suns have also largely lost their free ul­ti­ma­tonic stores of en­ergy.

41:4.4One of your near-by suns, which started life with about the same mass as yours, has now con­tracted al­most to the size of Uran­tia, hav­ing be­come forty thou­sand times as dense as your sun. The weight of this hot-cold gaseous-solid is about one ton per cu­bic inch. And still this sun shines with a faint red­dish glow, the se­nile glim­mer of a dy­ing monarch of light.

41:4.5Most of the suns, how­ever, are not so dense. One of your nearer neigh­bors has a den­sity ex­actly equal to that of your at­mo­sphere at sea level. If you were in the in­te­rior of this sun, you would be un­able to dis­cern any­thing. And tem­per­a­ture per­mit­ting, you could pen­e­trate the ma­jor­ity of the suns which twin­kle in the night sky and no­tice no more mat­ter than you per­ceive in the air of your earthly liv­ing rooms.

41:4.6The mas­sive sun of Velun­tia, one of the largest in Or­von­ton, has a den­sity only one one-thou­sandth that of Uran­tia’s at­mo­sphere. Were it in com­po­si­tion sim­i­lar to your at­mo­sphere and not super­heated, it would be such a vac­uum that hu­man be­ings would speed­ily suf­fo­cate if they were in or on it.

41:4.7An­other of the Or­von­ton gi­ants now has a sur­face tem­per­a­ture a tri­fle un­der three thou­sand de­grees. Its di­am­e­ter is over three hun­dred mil­lion miles—am­ple room to ac­com­mo­date your sun and the pres­ent or­bit of the earth. And yet, for all this enor­mous size, over forty mil­lion times that of your sun, its mass is only about thirty times greater. These enor­mous suns have an ex­tend­ing fringe that reaches al­most from one to the other.