In a spirit of mere
speculative curiosity it has been suggested that deep under the clouds
of the great planet there may be a comparatively small solid globe, even
a habitable world, closed round by a firmament all its own, whose vault,
raised 30,000 or 40,000 miles above the surface of the imprisoned
planet, appears only an unbroken dome, too distant to reveal its real
nature to watchers below, except, perhaps, under telescopic scrutiny;
enclosing, as in a shell, a transparent atmosphere, and deriving its
illumination partly from the sunlight that may filter through, but
mainly from some luminous source within.
But is not Jupiter almost equally fascinating to the imagination, if we
dismiss all attempts to picture a humanly impossible world shut up
within it, and turn rather to consider what its future may be, guided by
the not unreasonable hypothesis that, because of its immense size and
mass, it is still in a chaotic condition? Mention has been made of the
resemblance of Jupiter to the sun by virtue of their similar manner of
rotation. This is not the only reason for looking upon Jupiter as being,
in some respects, almost as much a solar as a planetary body. Its
exceptional brightness rather favors the view that a small part of the
light by which it shines comes from its own incandescence. In size and
mass it is half-way between the earth and the sun. Jupiter is eleven
times greater than the earth in diameter and thirteen hundred times
greater in volume; the sun is ten times greater than Jupiter in diameter
and a thousand times greater in volume.
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