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Show DEBT TO. SUM Sun Drags Earth Along STARKVILLE, Miss. "If we hsd to pay for the energy we get from the sun at present power rates, our bill would keep mounting at the rate of $G0 billion a minute," John DeMarche, noted physicist, reported report-ed recently. Professor DeMarche, a physics instructor at Mississippi State College, Col-lege, said although the sun exerts a tremendous influence on the world, only l2.000,000,000th of its energy ever reaches the earth. And if some inter-planetary disturbance dis-turbance should cut off this supply of sunlight, the professor said the earth would become a lifeless planet encased in frozen atmosphere. Once the earth passed the outer reaches of the sun's orbit, the atmosphere at-mosphere would lose, its moisture, until finally it became a cold solid surrounding a frigid and barren earth, he said. However, there is little possibility that a disturbance would shake the world loose from the sun's grip. Sun Is a Star He said the earth is held to the sun by a force equal to a round steel rod some 3,000 miles in diameter. diam-eter. That would cover the United States from coast to coast and reach from the southern part of Canada down to the Gulf of Mexico. The sun, as we call it, is actually actual-ly a star. And it's not the biggest star by a long shot. There Is one known star which is 2,700 times as large, and a number of them are 1,-300 1,-300 times as large. "At least one star Is known tc give more than 400,000 times as much light as does the sun," Professor Pro-fessor DeMarche said. "However, there are stars so dim that 500,000 of them would be required to shed as much light as does the sun." The light received from the sun Is equivalent to that from 600,000 full moons, or 50 billion of the brightest stars. Sun Drags the Earth All of this light and energy, he said, comes from matter charging Into radioactive energy, not from simple chemical combustion. All the stars are rushing through space, and "the sun is travelling toward the star Vega at 12 miles per second, or 43,200 miles an hour. The rest of the solar system, Including In-cluding the earth, is dragged along with the sun. "It is possible that the solar system will sometime strike denser den-ser Intersellar materials which will cause the earth to fuse with the sun," he said. "Some stars periodically peri-odically pulsate with great surges of energy. Such an explosion of the sun would certainly annihilate the earth." . As for the energy the earth has received from the sun, it would run into quite a figure if the payment had to cover all back energy. Preserved Pre-served and recorded in rocks Is an unmistakable record of over a billion bil-lion years of continuous sunshine. |