sun (Urantia’s)

41:9.5Your own sun has long since at­tained rel­a­tive equi­lib­rium be­tween its ex­pan­sion and con­trac­tion cy­cles, those dis­tur­bances which pro­duce the gi­gan­tic pul­sa­tions of many of the younger stars. Your sun is now pass­ing out of its six bil­lionth year. At the pres­ent time it is func­tion­ing through the pe­riod of great­est econ­omy. It will shine on as of pres­ent ef­fi­ciency for more than twenty-five bil­lion years. It will prob­a­bly ex­pe­ri­ence a par­tially ef­fi­cient pe­riod of de­cline as long as the com­bined pe­ri­ods of its youth and sta­bi­lized func­tion.

41:6.7It should be re­mem­bered that spec­tral anal­y­ses show only sun-sur­face com­po­si­tions. For ex­am­ple: So­lar spec­tra ex­hibit many iron lines, but iron is not the chief el­e­ment in the sun. This phe­nom­e­non is al­most wholly due to the pres­ent tem­per­a­ture of the sun’s sur­face, a lit­tle less than 6,000 de­grees, this tem­per­a­ture be­ing very fa­vor­able to the reg­istry of the iron spec­trum.

41:7.2The sur­face tem­per­a­ture of your sun is al­most 6,000 de­grees, but it rapidly in­creases as the in­te­rior is pen­e­trated un­til it at­tains the un­be­liev­able height of about 35,000,000 de­grees in the cen­tral re­gions. (All of these tem­per­a­tures re­fer to your Fahren­heit scale.)

41:6.3As your physi­cists have sus­pected, these mu­ti­lated rem­nants of so­lar cal­cium lit­er­ally ride the light beams for var­ied dis­tances, and thus their wide­spread dis­sem­i­na­tion through­out space is tremen­dously fa­cil­i­tated. The sodium atom, un­der cer­tain mod­i­fi­ca­tions, is also ca­pa­ble of light and en­ergy lo­co­mo­tion. The cal­cium feat is all the more re­mark­able since this el­e­ment has al­most twice the mass of sodium. Lo­cal space-per­me­ation by cal­cium is due to the fact that it es­capes from the so­lar pho­to­sphere, in mod­i­fied form, by lit­er­ally rid­ing the out­go­ing sun­beams. Of all the so­lar el­e­ments, cal­cium, not­with­stand­ing its com­par­a­tive bulk—con­tain­ing as it does twenty re­volv­ing elec­trons—is the most suc­cess­ful in es­cap­ing from the so­lar in­te­rior to the realms of space. This ex­plains why there is a cal­cium layer, a gaseous stone sur­face, on the sun six thou­sand miles thick; and this de­spite the fact that nine­teen lighter el­e­ments, and nu­mer­ous heav­ier ones, are un­der­neath.

41:6.4Cal­cium is an ac­tive and ver­sa­tile el­e­ment at so­lar tem­per­a­tures. The stone atom has two ag­ile and loosely at­tached elec­trons in the two outer elec­tronic cir­cuits, which are very close to­gether. Early in the atomic strug­gle it loses its outer elec­tron; where­upon it en­gages in a mas­ter­ful act of jug­gling the nine­teenth elec­tron back and forth be­tween the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cir­cuits of elec­tronic rev­o­lu­tion. By toss­ing this nine­teenth elec­tron back and forth be­tween its own or­bit and that of its lost com­pan­ion more than twenty-five thou­sand times a sec­ond, a mu­ti­lated stone atom is able par­tially to defy grav­ity and thus suc­cess­fully to ride the emerg­ing streams of light and en­ergy, the sun­beams, to lib­erty and ad­ven­ture. This cal­cium atom moves out­ward by al­ter­nate jerks of for­ward propul­sion, grasp­ing and let­ting go the sun­beam about twenty-five thou­sand times each sec­ond. And this is why stone is the chief com­po­nent of the worlds of space. Cal­cium is the most ex­pert so­lar-prison es­ca­per.

41:6.5The agility of this ac­ro­batic cal­cium elec­tron is in­di­cated by the fact that, when tossed by the tem­per­a­ture-X-ray so­lar forces to the cir­cle of the higher or­bit, it only re­mains in that or­bit for about one one-mil­lionth of a sec­ond; but be­fore the elec­tric-grav­ity power of the atomic nu­cleus pulls it back into its old or­bit, it is able to com­plete one mil­lion rev­o­lu­tions about the atomic cen­ter.

41:6.6Your sun has parted with an enor­mous quan­tity of its cal­cium, hav­ing lost tremen­dous amounts dur­ing the times of its con­vul­sive erup­tions in con­nec­tion with the for­ma­tion of the so­lar sys­tem. Much of the so­lar cal­cium is now in the outer crust of the sun.

57:1.1Uran­tia is of ori­gin in your sun, and your sun is one of the mul­ti­far­i­ous off­spring of the And­ro­no­ver neb­ula, which was one­time or­ga­nized as a com­po­nent part of the phys­i­cal power and ma­te­rial mat­ter of the lo­cal uni­verse of Neb­a­don. And this great neb­ula it­self took ori­gin in the uni­ver­sal force-charge of space in the super­uni­verse of Or­von­ton, long, long ago.

57:4.86,000,000,000 years ago marks the end of the ter­mi­nal breakup and the birth of your sun, the fifty-sixth from the last of the And­ro­no­ver sec­ond so­lar fam­ily. This fi­nal erup­tion of the neb­u­lar nu­cleus gave birth to 136,702 suns, most of them soli­tary orbs. The to­tal num­ber of suns and sun sys­tems hav­ing ori­gin in the And­ro­no­ver neb­ula was 1,013,628. The num­ber of the so­lar sys­tem sun is 1,013,572.

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.

41:7.13These so­lar tem­per­a­tures op­er­ate to enor­mously speed up the ul­ti­ma­tons and the elec­trons, at least such of the lat­ter as con­tinue to main­tain their ex­is­tence un­der these con­di­tions. You will re­al­ize what high tem­per­a­ture means by way of the ac­cel­er­a­tion of ul­ti­ma­tonic and elec­tronic ac­tiv­i­ties when you pause to con­sider that one drop of or­di­nary wa­ter con­tains over one bil­lion tril­lions of atoms. This is the en­ergy of more than one hun­dred horse­power ex­erted con­tin­u­ously for two years. The to­tal heat now given out by the so­lar sys­tem sun each sec­ond is suf­fi­cient to boil all the wa­ter in all the oceans on Uran­tia in just one sec­ond of time.

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.

58:2.4Your sun pours forth a ver­i­ta­ble flood of death-deal­ing rays, and your pleas­ant life on Uran­tia is due to the “for­tu­itous” in­flu­ence of more than two-score ap­par­ently ac­ci­den­tal pro­tec­tive op­er­a­tions sim­i­lar to the ac­tion of this unique ozone layer.

41:9.3Your own so­lar cen­ter ra­di­ates al­most one hun­dred bil­lion tons of ac­tual mat­ter an­nu­ally, while the gi­ant suns lose mat­ter at a prodi­gious rate dur­ing their ear­lier growth, the first bil­lion years. A sun’s life be­comes sta­ble af­ter the max­i­mum of in­ter­nal tem­per­a­ture is reached, and the sub­atomic en­er­gies be­gin to be re­leased. And it is just at this crit­i­cal point that the larger suns are given to con­vul­sive pul­sa­tions.

2:5.1“God is love”; there­fore his only per­sonal at­ti­tude to­wards the af­fairs of the uni­verse is al­ways a re­ac­tion of di­vine af­fec­tion. The Fa­ther loves us suf­fi­ciently to be­stow his life upon us. “He makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the un­just.”

140:3.16“Your Fa­ther in heaven makes the sun to shine on the evil as well as upon the good; like­wise he sends rain on the just and the un­just. You are the sons of God; even more, you are now the am­bas­sadors of my Fa­ther’s king­dom. Be mer­ci­ful, even as God is mer­ci­ful, and in the eter­nal fu­ture of the king­dom you shall be per­fect, even as your heav­enly Fa­ther is per­fect.

166:4.4“The Fa­ther causes his rain to fall on the just and the un­just; the sun like­wise shines on the righ­teous and the un­righ­teous. You know about those Galileans whose blood Pi­late min­gled with the sac­ri­fices, but I tell you these Galileans were not in any man­ner sin­ners above all their fel­lows just be­cause this hap­pened to them. You also know about the eigh­teen men upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, killing them. Think not that these men who were thus de­stroyed were of­fend­ers above all their breth­ren in Je­ru­sa­lem. These folks were sim­ply in­no­cent vic­tims of one of the ac­ci­dents of time.

41:6.1In de­ci­pher­ing spec­tral phe­nom­ena, it should be re­mem­bered that space is not empty; that light, in travers­ing space, is some­times slightly mod­i­fied by the var­i­ous forms of en­ergy and mat­ter which cir­cu­late in all or­ga­nized space. Some of the lines in­di­cat­ing un­known mat­ter which ap­pear in the spec­tra of your sun are due to mod­i­fi­ca­tions of well-known el­e­ments which are float­ing through­out space in shat­tered form, the atomic ca­su­al­ties of the fierce en­coun­ters of the so­lar el­e­men­tal bat­tles. Space is per­vaded by these wan­der­ing dere­licts, es­pe­cially sodium and cal­cium.

• Andon narrowed avoided

63:6.2An­don’s phi­los­o­phy had been most con­fused; he had barely es­caped be­com­ing a fire wor­shiper be­cause of the great com­fort de­rived from his ac­ci­den­tal dis­cov­ery of fire. Rea­son, how­ever, di­rected him from his own dis­cov­ery to the sun as a su­pe­rior and more awe-in­spir­ing source of heat and light, but it was too re­mote, and so he failed to be­come a sun wor­shiper.

• great stones set up as tokens to sun; Stonehenge
• in agricultural ages

80:9.13These were the times of the New Stone Age over­lap­ping the on­com­ing Bronze Age. In Scan­di­navia it was the Bronze Age as­so­ci­ated with mother wor­ship. In south­ern France and Spain it was the New Stone Age as­so­ci­ated with sun wor­ship. This was the time of the build­ing of the cir­cu­lar and roof­less sun tem­ples. The Eu­ro­pean white races were en­er­getic builders, de­light­ing to set up great stones as to­kens to the sun, much as did their later-day de­scen­dants at Stone­henge. The vogue of sun wor­ship in­di­cates that this was a great pe­riod of agri­cul­ture in south­ern Eu­rope.

• persists in Brittany

80:9.14The su­per­sti­tions of this com­par­a­tively re­cent sun-wor­ship­ing era even now per­sist in the folk­ways of Brit­tany. Al­though Chris­tian­ized for over fif­teen hun­dred years, these Bre­tons still re­tain charms of the New Stone Age for ward­ing off the evil eye. They still keep thun­der­stones in the chim­ney as pro­tec­tion against light­ning. The Bre­tons never min­gled with the Scan­di­na­vian Nordics. They are sur­vivors of the orig­i­nal An­don­ite in­hab­i­tants of west­ern Eu­rope, mixed with the Med­i­ter­ra­nean stock.

85:5.1The wor­ship of rocks, hills, trees, and an­i­mals nat­u­rally de­vel­oped up through fear­ful ven­er­a­tion of the el­e­ments to the de­ifi­ca­tion of the sun, moon, and stars. In In­dia and else­where the stars were re­garded as the glo­ri­fied souls of great men who had de­parted from the life in the flesh. The Chaldean star cultists con­sid­ered them­selves to be the chil­dren of the sky fa­ther and the earth mother.

• sun honored by naming of Sunday

85:5.2Moon wor­ship pre­ceded sun wor­ship. Ven­er­a­tion of the moon was at its height dur­ing the hunt­ing era, while sun wor­ship be­came the chief re­li­gious cer­e­mony of the sub­se­quent ag­ri­cul­tural ages. So­lar wor­ship first took ex­ten­sive root in In­dia, and there it per­sisted the longest. In Per­sia sun ven­er­a­tion gave rise to the later Mith­raic cult. Among many peo­ples the sun was re­garded as the an­ces­tor of their kings. The Chaldeans put the sun in the cen­ter of “the seven cir­cles of the uni­verse.” Later civ­i­liza­tions hon­ored the sun by giv­ing its name to the first day of the week.

85:5.3The sun god was sup­posed to be the mys­tic fa­ther of the vir­gin-born sons of des­tiny who ever and anon were thought to be be­stowed as sav­iors upon fa­vored races. These super­nat­u­ral in­fants were al­ways put adrift upon some sa­cred river to be res­cued in an ex­traor­di­nary man­ner, af­ter which they would grow up to be­come mirac­u­lous per­son­al­i­ties and the de­liv­er­ers of their peo­ples.

• cult absorbed Salem gospel

93:7.3But the task was so great and the tribes were so back­ward that the re­sults were vague and in­def­i­nite. From one gen­er­a­tion to an­other the Salem gospel found lodg­ment here and there, but ex­cept in Pales­tine, never was the idea of one God able to claim the con­tin­ued al­le­giance of a whole tribe or race. Long be­fore the com­ing of Je­sus the teach­ings of the early Salem mis­sion­ar­ies had be­come gen­er­ally sub­merged in the older and more uni­ver­sal su­per­sti­tions and be­liefs. The orig­i­nal Mel­chiz­e­dek gospel had been al­most wholly ab­sorbed in the be­liefs in the Great Mother, the Sun, and other an­cient cults.

• among Egyptians

95:2.7The Egyp­tians long be­lieved that the stars twin­kling in the night sky rep­re­sented the sur­vival of the souls of the wor­thy dead; other sur­vivors they thought were ab­sorbed into the sun. Dur­ing a cer­tain pe­riod, so­lar ven­er­a­tion be­came a species of an­ces­tor wor­ship. The slop­ing en­trance pas­sage of the great pyra­mid pointed di­rectly to­ward the Pole Star so that the soul of the king, when emerg­ing from the tomb, could go straight to the sta­tion­ary and es­tab­lished con­stel­la­tions of the fixed stars, the sup­posed abode of the kings.

95:2.8When the oblique rays of the sun were ob­served pen­e­trat­ing earth­ward through an aper­ture in the clouds, it was be­lieved that they be­to­kened the let­ting down of a ce­les­tial stair­way whereon the king and other righ­teous souls might as­cend. “King Pepi has put down his ra­di­ance as a stair­way un­der his feet whereon to as­cend to his mother.”

• Amenemope taught

95:4.2Amen­emope taught that riches and for­tune were the gift of God, and this con­cept thor­oughly col­ored the later ap­pear­ing He­brew phi­los­o­phy. This no­ble teacher be­lieved that God-con­scious­ness was the de­ter­min­ing fac­tor in all con­duct; that ev­ery mo­ment should be lived in the re­al­iza­tion of the pres­ence of, and re­spon­si­bil­ity to, God. The teach­ings of this sage were sub­se­quently trans­lated into He­brew and be­came the sa­cred book of that peo­ple long be­fore the Old Tes­ta­ment was re­duced to writ­ing. The chief preach­ment of this good man had to do with in­struct­ing his son in up­right­ness and hon­esty in gov­ern­men­tal po­si­tions of trust, and these no­ble sen­ti­ments of long ago would do honor to any mod­ern states­man.

• Ikhnaton established monotheism under guise of

95:5.6Very wisely Ikh­na­ton sought to es­tab­lish mono­the­ism un­der the guise of the sun-god. This de­ci­sion to ap­proach the wor­ship of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther by ab­sorb­ing all gods into the wor­ship of the sun was due to the coun­sel of the Salemite physi­cian. Ikh­na­ton took the gen­er­al­ized doc­trines of the then ex­is­tent Aton faith re­gard­ing the fa­ther­hood and moth­er­hood of De­ity and cre­ated a re­li­gion which rec­og­nized an in­ti­mate wor­ship­ful re­la­tion be­tween man and God.

• Ikhnaton established monotheism under guise of

95:5.7Ikh­na­ton was wise enough to main­tain the out­ward wor­ship of Aton, the sun-god, while he led his as­so­ciates in the dis­guised wor­ship of the One God, cre­ator of Aton and su­preme Fa­ther of all. This young teacher-king was a pro­lific writer, be­ing au­thor of the ex­po­si­tion en­ti­tled “The One God,” a book of thirty-one chap­ters, which the priests, when re­turned to power, ut­terly de­stroyed. Ikh­na­ton also wrote one hun­dred and thirty-seven hymns, twelve of which are now pre­served in the Old Tes­ta­ment Book of Psalms, cred­ited to He­brew au­thor­ship.

• Ikhnaton established monotheism under guise of

95:5.11But the priests could not fully over­come the mono­the­is­tic wave. In­creas­ingly they were com­pelled to com­bine and hy­phen­ate their gods; more and more the fam­ily of gods con­tracted. Ikh­na­ton had as­so­ci­ated the flam­ing disc of the heav­ens with the cre­ator God, and this idea con­tin­ued to flame up in the hearts of men, even of the priests, long af­ter the young re­former had passed on. Never did the con­cept of mono­the­ism die out of the hearts of men in Egypt and in the world. It per­sisted even to the ar­rival of the Cre­ator Son of that same di­vine Fa­ther, the one God whom Ikh­na­ton had so zeal­ously pro­claimed for the wor­ship of all Egypt.

• Mithraic Sol Invictus

98:5.3The Mith­raic cult por­trayed a mil­i­tant god tak­ing ori­gin in a great rock, en­gag­ing in valiant ex­ploits, and caus­ing wa­ter to gush forth from a rock struck with his ar­rows. There was a flood from which one man es­caped in a spe­cially built boat and a last sup­per which Mithras cel­e­brated with the sun-god be­fore he as­cended into the heav­ens. This sun-god, or Sol In­vic­tus, was a de­gen­er­a­tion of the Ahura-Mazda de­ity con­cept of Zoroas­tri­an­ism. Mithras was con­ceived as the sur­viv­ing cham­pion of the sun-god in his strug­gle with the god of dark­ness. And in rec­og­ni­tion of his slay­ing the myth­i­cal sa­cred bull, Mithras was made im­mor­tal, be­ing ex­alted to the sta­tion of in­ter­ces­sor for the hu­man race among the gods on high.

• ozone layer filters out extreme ultraviolet rays

58:2.2The earth’s at­mo­sphere is all but opaque to much of the so­lar ra­di­a­tion at the ex­treme ul­tra­vi­o­let end of the spec­trum. Most of these short wave lengths are ab­sorbed by a layer of ozone which ex­ists through­out a level about ten miles above the sur­face of the earth, and which ex­tends space­ward for an­other ten miles. The ozone per­me­at­ing this re­gion, at con­di­tions pre­vail­ing on the earth’s sur­face, would make a layer only one tenth of an inch thick; nev­er­the­less, this rel­a­tively small and ap­par­ently in­signif­i­cant amount of ozone pro­tects Uran­tia in­hab­i­tants from the ex­cess of these dan­ger­ous and de­struc­tive ul­tra­vi­o­let ra­di­a­tions pres­ent in sun­light. But were this ozone layer just a tri­fle thicker, you would be de­prived of the highly im­por­tant and health-giv­ing ul­tra­vi­o­let rays which now reach the earth’s sur­face, and which are an­ces­tral to one of the most es­sen­tial of your vi­ta­mins.

• ionizes upper atmosphere

58:2.6The lower five or six miles of the earth’s at­mo­sphere is the tro­po­sphere; this is the re­gion of winds and air cur­rents which pro­vide weather phe­nom­ena. Above this re­gion is the in­ner iono­sphere and next above is the strato­sphere. As­cend­ing from the sur­face of the earth, the tem­per­a­ture steadily falls for six or eight miles, at which height it reg­is­ters around 70 de­grees be­low zero F. This tem­per­a­ture range of from 65 to 70 de­grees be­low zero F. is un­changed in the fur­ther as­cent for forty miles; this realm of con­stant tem­per­a­ture is the strato­sphere. At a height of forty-five or fifty miles, the tem­per­a­ture be­gins to rise, and this in­crease con­tin­ues un­til, at the level of the au­ro­ral dis­plays, a tem­per­a­ture of 1200° F. is at­tained, and it is this in­tense heat that ion­izes the oxy­gen. But tem­per­a­ture in such a rar­efied at­mo­sphere is hardly com­pa­ra­ble with heat reck­on­ing at the sur­face of the earth. Bear in mind that one half of all your at­mo­sphere is to be found in the first three miles. The height of the earth’s at­mo­sphere is in­di­cated by the high­est au­ro­ral stream­ers—about four hun­dred miles.

58:2.7Au­ro­ral phe­nom­ena are di­rectly re­lated to sun­spots, those so­lar cy­clones which whirl in op­po­site di­rec­tions above and be­low the so­lar equa­tor, even as do the ter­res­trial trop­i­cal hur­ri­canes. Such at­mo­spheric dis­tur­bances whirl in op­po­site di­rec­tions when oc­cur­ring above or be­low the equa­tor.

58:2.8The power of sun­spots to al­ter light fre­quen­cies shows that these so­lar storm cen­ters func­tion as enor­mous mag­nets. Such mag­netic fields are able to hurl charged par­ti­cles from the sun­spot craters out through space to the earth’s outer at­mo­sphere, where their ion­iz­ing in­flu­ence pro­duces such spec­tac­u­lar au­ro­ral dis­plays. There­fore do you have the great­est au­ro­ral phe­nom­ena when sun­spots are at their height—or soon there­after—at which time the spots are more gen­er­ally equa­to­ri­ally sit­u­ated.

58:2.9Even the com­pass nee­dle is re­spon­sive to this so­lar in­flu­ence since it turns slightly to the east as the sun rises and slightly to the west as the sun nears set­ting. This hap­pens ev­ery day, but dur­ing the height of sun­spot cy­cles this vari­a­tion of the com­pass is twice as great. These di­ur­nal wan­der­ings of the com­pass are in re­sponse to the in­creased ion­iza­tion of the up­per at­mo­sphere, which is pro­duced by the sun­light.

58:2.10It is the pres­ence of two dif­fer­ent lev­els of elec­tri­fied con­duct­ing re­gions in the super­strat­o­sphere that ac­counts for the long-dis­tance trans­mis­sion of your long- and short-wave ra­dio­broad­casts. Your broad­cast­ing is some­times dis­turbed by the ter­rific storms which oc­ca­sion­ally rage in the realms of these outer iono­spheres.

• health-giving and disease-destroying properties

66:5.20The great ob­sta­cle in the way of pro­mot­ing hy­giene among these ig­no­rant peo­ples con­sisted in the fact that the real causes of many dis­eases were too small to be seen by the naked eye, and also be­cause they all held fire in su­per­sti­tious re­gard. It re­quired thou­sands of years to per­suade them to burn refuse. In the mean­time they were urged to bury their de­cay­ing rub­bish. The great san­i­tary ad­vance of this epoch came from the dis­sem­i­na­tion of knowl­edge re­gard­ing the health-giv­ing and dis­ease-de­stroy­ing prop­er­ties of sun­light.

• 11-1/2 year cycle

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.

• 11-1/2 year cycle
• cycles show our sun was variable star

57:5.2To­day, your sun has achieved rel­a­tive sta­bil­ity, but its eleven and one-half year sun­spot cy­cles be­tray that it was a vari­able star in its youth. In the early days of your sun the con­tin­ued con­trac­tion and con­se­quent grad­ual in­crease of tem­per­a­ture ini­ti­ated tremen­dous con­vul­sions on its sur­face. These ti­tanic heaves re­quired three and one-half days to com­plete a cy­cle of vary­ing bright­ness. This vari­able state, this pe­ri­odic pul­sa­tion, ren­dered your sun highly re­spon­sive to cer­tain out­side in­flu­ences which were to be shortly en­coun­tered.

58:2.1The plan­e­tary at­mo­sphere fil­ters through to the earth about one two-bil­lionth of the sun’s to­tal light em­a­na­tion. If the light falling upon North Amer­ica were paid for at the rate of two cents per kilo­watt-hour, the an­nual light bill would be up­ward of 800 quadrillion dol­lars. Chicago’s bill for sun­shine would amount to con­sid­er­ably over 100 mil­lion dol­lars a day. And it should be re­mem­bered that you re­ceive from the sun other forms of en­ergy—light is not the only so­lar con­tri­bu­tion reach­ing your at­mo­sphere. Vast so­lar en­er­gies pour in upon Uran­tia em­brac­ing wave lengths rang­ing both above and be­low the rec­og­ni­tion range of hu­man vi­sion.