On The Universality Of The Law Of Gravitation And On The Orbits And General Characteristics Of Binary Stars PDF Download

Excerpt from Researches on the Evolution of the Stellar Systems, Vol. 1: On the Universality of the Law of Gravitation and on the Orbits and General Characteristics of Binary Stars One hundred years ago Laplace published an outline of the nebular hypothesis, which has since been confirmed and developed by the labors of astronomers. His physical explanation of the evolution of the planets and satellites, under the gradual operation of the laws of nature, was the logical outcome of his profound study of the mechanism of our system, and rested mainly on the common direction of motion and the small eccentricities and mutual inclinations of the orbits. From the concurrence of such remarkable phenomena in a great number of bodies the author of the Mecanique Celeste was led to conceive that at a remote epoch in the past, the matter now constituting the planets and satellites was expanded into a vast rotating fiery nebula, which slowly contracted with the radiation of its heat into surrounding space. According to the mechanical principle of the conservation of areas, the contraction accelerated the rotation and thereby increased the oblateness; when the centrifugal force at the equator became equal to the force of gravity the particles ceased to fall towards the centre, and the nebula shed successive rings or zones of vapor from its equatorial periphery. The condensation of the several rings thus abandoned by the contracting mass eventually gave rise to the bodies of the planetary system. Laplace observed that the comets, unlike the planets and satellites, have every degree of inclination and very high eccentricities, and hence he concluded that they were originally foreign to the solar system; accordingly, in the nebular hypothesis, the comets are regarded as small nebulae which have been drawn to the sun in its secular motion among the fixed stars. The above hypothesis, based on sound dynamical principles and worked out in detail by the philosophic judgement and imaginative genius of Laplace, has merited and received the attention of subsequent natural philosophers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."