Note 14 — THE NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS.

A reference may fitly be made here to a reason given by Mons. Babinet for rejection of the Nebular Hypothesis. He has calculated that taking the existing Sun, with its observed angular velocity, its substance, if expanded so as to fill the orbit of Neptune, would have nothing approaching the angular velocity which the time of revolution of that planet implies. The assumption he makes is inadmissible. He supposes that all parts of the nebulous spheroid when it filled Neptune's orbit, had the same angular velocities. But the process of nebular condensation as indicated above, implies that the remoter flocculi of nebulous matter, later in reaching the central mass, and forming its peripheral portions, will acquire, during their longer journeys towards it, greater velocities. An inspection of one of the spiral nebulæ, as 51st or 99th Messier, at once shows that the outlying portions when they reach the nucleus, will form an equatorial belt moving round the common centre more rapidly than the rest. Thus the central parts will have small angular velocities, while there will be increasing angular velocities of parts increasingly remote from the centre. And while the density of the spheroid continues small, fluid friction will scarcely at all change these differences.

A like criticism may, I think, be passed on an opinion expressed by Prof. Newcomb. He says:—"When the contraction [of the nebulous spheroid] had gone so far that the centrifugal and attracting forces nearly balanced each other at the outer equatorial limit of the mass, the result would have been that contraction in the direction of the equator would cease entirely, and be confined to the polar regions, each particle dropping, not towards the sun, but towards the plane of the solar equator. Thus, we should have a constant flattening of the spheroidal atmosphere until it was reduced to a thin flat disk. This disk might then separate itself into rings, which would form planets in much the same way that Laplace supposed. But there would probably be no marked difference in the age of the planets." (Popular Astronomy, p. 512.) Now this conclusion assumes, like that of M. Babinet, that all parts of the nebulous spheroid had equal angular velocities. If, as above contended, it is inferable from the process by which a nebulous spheroid was formed, that its outer portions revolved with greater angular velocities than its inner; then the inference which Prof. Newcomb draws is not necessitated.