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The indicators of the positionals quivered a little and altered, and in the visi-screen the hills of the valley, that a moment before had been quite close and large, had diminished to purple-green mounds below. Then the accelerating sensations began. Carse had the "feel" of the asteroidal ship and his controlling hand grew bolder.
Jupiter's innermost moon conforms in its motions strictly, indeed inevitably, to the plane of his equatorial protuberance, following, however, a sensibly elliptical path the major axis of which is in rapid revolution. Its very insignificance raises the suspicion that it may not prove solitary. Possibly it belongs to a zone peopled by asteroidal satellites.
But before it closed, its cultivation had received a powerful stimulus through the invention of an improved method. The name of Olbers has already been brought prominently before our readers in connection with asteroidal discoveries; these, however, were but chance excursions from the path of cometary research which he steadily pursued through life.
"Frankly, without them this whole structure" his hands swept out widely "my whole asteroidal kingdom, would have been impossible. Most of my problems in constructing it were solved here. And in the future other problems, far greater, will be solved here!" Hawk Carse by now understood very well Dr.
Some astronomers have given and are still giving their almost undivided attention to asteroidal investigation. The discoveries have been mostly made by a few principal explorers. The astronomer, Palisa, from the observatory of Pola and that of Vienna, has found no fewer than seventy-five of the whole group.
Mars became an agate bead, then a hazy sphere with those swirled, almost fluid markings, where the spores of a perhaps sentient vegetable life followed the paths of thin winds, blowing equatorward from the polar caps of hoarfrost. The three stellene rings bumped lightly on the ten mile chunk of captured asteroidal rock and nickel-iron that was Phobos, Mars' nearer moon. Gravitation was almost nil.
The great Lagrange bestowed upon it his analytical imprimatur, showing that the explosive forces required to produce the supposed catastrophe came well within the bounds of possibility; since a velocity of less than twenty times that of a cannon-ball leaving the gun's mouth would have sufficed, according to his calculation, to launch the asteroidal fragments on their respective paths.
It may be true that a large planet once occupied the asteroidal space, and that the same has been rent by some violence into thousands of fragments. It may be observed that the period of rotation of the inferior planets corresponds in general with that of our earth, while the corresponding period of the superior or outside planets is less than one-half as great.
The mean distance from the sun of the nearest asteroid, Eros, is 135,000,000 miles, and that of the most distant, Thule, 400,000,000 miles. Wide gaps exist in the asteroidal zone where few or no members of the group are to be found, and Prof. Daniel Kirkwood long ago demonstrated the influence of Jupiter in producing these gaps.
Even the secondary purpose that of asteroidal discovery served by detailed stellar enumeration, is more surely attained by photography than by laborious visual comparison. For planetary movement betrays itself in a comparatively short time by turning the imprinted image of the object affected by it from a dot into a trail.
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