"Perihelium" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... long axis of the elliptical orbit, stand perpendicularly to the orbit of the nucleus. That is, the extremity of the tail farthest from the sun, in addition to its onward motion, has acquired a lateral motion that has lifted it 50,000,000 miles in the first day of its perihelion. The velocity of the extremity has been vastly accelerated over that of the nucleus, and it has moreover a sheer lift above the orbit of the nucleus. Now this lift is in opposition to gravity; neither is it in consequence of any previous momentum, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... made plain that comets are subject to the law of gravitation equally with the planets; that there are many which regularly return to the neighborhood of the sun (perihelion); and that these travel in orbits differing from those of the planets only in their greater eccentricity, although they have the peculiarity that they do not, like the planets, all go round the sun in the same direction, ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... would be incompatible with the stability of their systems and with the planetary nature of their orbits. Unless close under the protecting wing of their immediate superior, the sweep of their other sun, in its perihelion passage round their own, might carry them off or whirl them into orbits utterly incompatible with conditions necessary for ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... Mars as being the next orb removed from the Sun after our own world in the advance outward from our solar center, has always attracted attention. At perihelion, when in opposition with the earth, it is 35 millions of miles from the earth, and its surface, as is well known from the drawings of Kaiser, the Leyden astronomer, and of Schiaparelli, Denning, Perrotin and Terby, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... shooting stars burst upon their eyes. Hundreds of meteorites, ignited by the friction of the atmosphere, irradiated the shadow of the luminous train, and lined the cloudy parts of the disc with their fire. At this period the earth was in its perihelion, and the month of December is so propitious to these shooting stars, that astronomers have counted as many as twenty-four thousand in an hour. But Michel Ardan, disdaining scientific reasonings, preferred thinking that the earth was thus saluting the departure ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... first visit it has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. There is no snow there. There are no summer showers. The tailor recognizes no aphelion or perihelion in his custom: the thin woollen suit which his patron had made in April is comfortably worn until April again. The only change of stockings there is from wet to dry, or from soiled to clean. Save that in so-called ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... Tycho's observation the angle MES. So the triangle could be solved except for scale, and the ratio of SE to SM would give the distance of Mars from the sun in terms of that of the earth. Measuring from a fixed position of Mars (e.g. perihelion), this gave the variation of SE, showing the earth's inequality. Measuring from a fixed position of the earth, it would give similarly a series of positions of Mars, which, though lying not far from the circle whose diameter was the axis of Mars' orbit, joining perihelion and aphelion, ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... and progressive. The orbit of a planet is determined (omitting perturbations) by two causes: first, the action of the central body, a permanent cause, which alternately increases and diminishes as the planet draws nearer to or goes farther from its perihelion, and which acts at every point in a different direction; and, secondly, the tendency of the planet to continue moving in the direction and with the velocity which it has already acquired. This force also grows greater as the planet draws nearer to its perihelion, because as it does ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... curvature?" There was a comet visible at the time of one of these little journeys. Dr. Wollaston had made a drawing of the orbit and its elements; but, having left it in town, he described the lines so accurately without naming them, that I remarked at once, "That is the curtate or perihelion distance," which pleased him greatly, as it showed how accurate his description was. He was a chess-player, and, when travelling alone, he used to carry a book with diagrams of partially-played games, in which it is required to give checkmate in a fixed number of moves. He would study ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... explain the gradual formation of a solar system by a process of cooling and shrinking, to which the central orb is exposed. And here we are met by a difficulty at the outset; for the existence of comets with their very eccentric orbits is wholly irreconcilable with the theory. At their perihelion, many of these bodies pass within the orbit of Mercury, while the aphelion of some lies without the path of Uranus. Where were they, when the body of the sun filled up the whole of the vast sphere circumscribed by the orbit of the remotest ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... Martian summer, had often been observed. Lowell plots day by day this waning. It is evident from his observations that the snowfall must be light indeed. We see in his map the south pole turned towards us. Mars in perihelion always turns his south pole towards the sun and therefore towards the Earth. We see that between the dates June 3rd to August 3rd—or in two months—the polar snow had almost completely vanished. This denotes a very ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... Liver was at Perihelion, he had a Complexion suggesting an Alligator Pear, and his Eye-Balls should have been ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... and a number of otherwise promising planets became unfit for human exploitation. In Andromeda, a super-nova flared. The light of its explosion would not reach Kandar for very many thousands of years. The largest comet in the galaxy reached perihelion, and practically outshone the sun it circled. Nobody saw it, because nobody lived there. On a dreary, red-sky planet in Mousset, a thing squirmed heavily out of a stagnant sea and blinked stupidly at the remarkable above-water cosmos ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the period of the Comet of 1680 has been estimated at three thousand years. It approaches the Sun, so as to be nearer to it than our Moon is to us, whilst it recedes to a distance 853 times greater than the distance of the Earth from the Sun. On the 17th of December, 1680, it was at its perihelion—that is, at its greatest proximity to the Sun; it is now continuing its path beyond the Neptunian orbit. Its velocity varies according to its distance from the solar body. At its perihelion it travels thousands of leagues per minute; at its aphelion ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... reality. In the present instance, the answer afforded may be said to have laid the foundation of this branch of astronomy. Halley's comet punctually reappeared on Christmas Day, 1758, and effected its perihelion passage on the 12th of March following, thus proving beyond dispute that some at least of these erratic bodies are domesticated within our system, and strictly conform, if not to its unwritten customs (so ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... the intruder told them blandly. "That is why we stopped the train here. It is the only flat area sufficiently unsettled for our landing and departure without detection. We must return at once or lose perihelion." ...
— Reel Life Films • Samuel Kimball Merwin |
