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Show Inleresiing Picture of Birth of Solar System Tracing time and its changes back to the very beginning of things, Sir James Jeans of Cambridge gives, in a recently published work, a wonderful picture of the birth of our solar system sys-tem as the result of a collision some 2,000,(100,000 years ago. "A second star, wandering blindly through space, happened to come within with-in hailing distance of the sun. Just as the sun and moon raise tides on the earth, so this second star must have raised tides on the surface of the sun ... a huge tidal wave must have traveled over the surface of the sun, ultimately forming a mountain of prodigious pro-digious height, which would rise even higher and higher as the cause of the disturbance came nearer and nearer. And, before the second star began to recede, its tidal pull had become so powerful that this mountain was torn to pieces and threw off small fragments frag-ments of itself, much as the crest of a wave throws off spray. These small fragments have been circulating around their parent sun ever since. They are the planets, great and small, of which our earth is one." |