Scientific people, however, found the
intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that
the new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its
motion was quite different from the orderly progress of the
planets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its satellite was
becoming now of an unprecedented kind.
Few people without a training in science can realise the huge
isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets,
its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a
vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the
orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation
has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness,
for twenty million times a million miles. That is the smallest
estimate of the distance to be traversed before the very nearest of
the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets more unsubstantial
than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge
crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century
this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was,
bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of
the sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was
clearly visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely
sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus.
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