A. What should we understand by the Milky Way?
B. Has God created from all eternity? What do the spirits tell us about their own creation?
C. What are the planets composed of?
Text for reading
330. The Milky Way – On the beautiful, moonless and starry nights, everyone can see that whitish glow which crosses the sky from one end to another and that the ancients dubbed the Milky Way due to its milky appearance.
331. The research of observers led to the understanding of its nature and revealed that there, where the eyes get lost and would encounter only a faint light, there are millions of suns brighter and more important than the one that illuminates the earth.
332. In fact, the Milky Way is a prairie-sown meadow with solar or planetary flowers, shining in all its enormous length. Our Sun and all the bodies that follow it are part of this set of radiant globes that form the Milky Way. However, despite its gigantic proportions relative to the Earth, and the greatness of its empire, the Sun occupies only an inappreciable place in such vast creation.
333. One can also judge the smallness of the sun’s domain, even more so, the nothingness of our tiny Earth. What would earth be then if one were to consider the beings that populate the Milky Way! I say “nothingness" because our determinations apply not only to the material and physical extent of the bodies we are studying - that would not be much - but also and above all to their moral state as a place, and the degree they occupy in the eternal hierarchy of beings. Creation is displayed there in all its majesty, generating and propagating the manifestations of life and intelligence all around the solar world and in each of the systems that surround it on all sides.
334. Such considerations will carry even more weight if one were to reflect on the status of the Milky Way itself, which in the vastness of sidereal creations, represents nothing more than a unperceivable and unappreciable point when seen from afar, because it is no more than a stellar nebula among the millions existing in space. If it seems broader and richer to us than others, it is the sole reason that surrounds us and unfolds in all its extension under our eyes, while the others, lost in the unfathomable depths, barely let themselves be glimpse.
335. The fixed stars - the so-called “fixed stars” that constellate the two hemispheres of the firmament are not isolated from all outside attraction, as is generally supposed. Far from it: they all belong to the same cluster of stars stellar. This agglomeration is nothing but a large nebula of which we are part, and whose equatorial plane(1), projected through the sky, named after the “Milky Way”. All suns comprising it in solidarity; their multiple influences continually react upon each other and universal gravity units all of them in the same family.
336. Among those diverse suns, most are mostly like ours, surrounded by secondary worlds that they they illuminate and support through the same laws that govern the life in our own planetary system. Some, like Sirius, are thousands of times richer and more magnificent in size than ours, and their role in the universe is more importantly, just as the planets that revolve around them are greater in number and far more advanced than ours. Others are very dissimilar in their stellar functions. It is thus that certain number of these suns, true twins in the sidereal order, are accompanied by their same-age siblings and form in space dual systems, to which nature has given functions are different than those pertaining to our Sun(2).
337. There, the years are not measured by the same periods, or the same days the same suns, and those worlds, illuminated by a double torch, have received as their inheritance conditions of existence unimaginable to those who have not left this tiny terrestrial world.
338. Other stars, without entourage and deprived of planets, have received better elements of habitability than those granted the others. In its vastness, the laws of nature are diversified and if the unit is the great expression of the universe, infinite variety is also its eternal attribute.
339. The so-called fixed stars are not immovable in the expanse. The constellations that have been imagined in the canopy of the sky are not all real symbolic creations. Their distance from the Earth and the perspective from which the universe is measured from this station are the two causes of this two-fold optical illusion.
340. We have seen that the entirety of the stars that twinkle in the bluish dome is found embedded in a cosmic clustering, in the same nebula we call the Milky Way. However, despite belonging to the same group, each one of these heavenly bodies is nonetheless animated by its own movement of translation through space. Nowhere there is absolute rest. They are governed by the universal laws of gravitation and roll in the unlimited space under the relentless thrust of this immense strength. They do not all roll along random routes, but according to certain orbits whose center is occupied by a much larger heavenly body.
341. To make my words more understandable through an example, I will speak especially of our sun. Through modern observations, it is known that the sun is not fixed, neither central place as was believed in the early days of the new astronomy; but that it travels through space, dragging its vast system of planets, satellites and comets. This journey is not fortuitous and the sun does not wander through the infinite voids, led astray from the regions assigned to it, its children and its subjects. No, its orbit is measured, and concurrently with other suns of the same order and surrounded by a certain number of inhabited planets, it gravitates around a central sun. Its gravitation movement, like that of its sister suns, is imperceptible to annual observations, because only large number of century-long periods would hardly be sufficient to mark out the time of one such stellar year.
342. The central sun of which we speak is itself a secondary globe with respect to another still more important one, around which it continues a slow and measured journey, in the company of other suns of the same order. And these heavenly bodies, uncountable in number, each live in solidarity with the others. In that same way that nothing is isolated in the economy of your tiny terrestrial world, so also nothing isolated in the immeasurable universe. Nowhere there is immobility or silence or night!
343. Deserts of space - Unimaginable desert without limits, extend beyond the cluster of stars that we have been discussing. Solitude follow solitudes and the immeasurable plains vacuum distend the breadth apart. Masses of cosmic matter are found isolated in space like floating islands of the enormous archipelago.
344. If in some way one would want to appreciate the enormous distance that separates the star cluster to which we belong from the other clusters that are closest to us, one would have to understand that these stellar islands are scattered in the vast ocean of the heavens, and that the extent separating them from one another, is incomparably greater than those which measure their respective dimensions.
345. Indeed, beyond such vast solitudes, worlds radiate in their magnificence, as much as they do in areas accessible to human examination. Beyond these deserts, splendid oases float in the limpid ether and ceaselessly renew admirable scenes of existence and life. There, far-off clusters of cosmic substance unfold, which the keen eye of the telescope glimpses through the transparent regions of our sky: those nebulae that you call irresolvable, and which appear like light clouds of white dust in a unfamiliar spot of ethereal space.
346. There, new worlds are revealed and developed, whose varied and unfamiliar conditions, different from those inherent to our globe, give them a life that human conceptions cannot imagine, nor their studies ascertain. It is there that the creative power glows in all its fullness.
__________
(1) Equatorial refers to the equator, name that, with respect to the earth globe, means the great circle of the terrestrial sphere, perpendicular to the line joining the poles.
(2) This is what happens in astronomy, the name "binary stars". They are two suns that revolve around each other like a planet around its sun. What a unique and magnificent spectacle must be enjoyed by the inhabitants of the worlds that make up these systems illuminated by dual sun! But how different the conditions of life must be there!
Answers to Proposed Questions
A. What should we understand by the Milky Way?
Milky Way is the name given to the nebula that forms long white spot on the dark sky. This name was given because of its milky appearance. The research of observers led to the understanding of its nature and revealed that there, where the eyes get lost and would encounter only a faint light, there are millions of suns brighter and more important than the one that illuminates the earth. In fact, the Milky Way is a prairie-sown meadow with solar or planetary flowers, shining in all its enormous length. Our Sun and all the bodies that follow it are part of this set of radiant globes that form the Milky Way. (Genesis, Ch. VI, items 32 to 35)
B. Has God created from all eternity? What do the spirits tell us about their own creation?
There is, by its nature, from all eternity, God created from all eternity and could not be otherwise. Concerning the way of creation of the Spirits, which can be said is that the spirit does not receive divine illumination, which gives it free will and consciousness along with the notion of its higher destiny, without having passed through divinely unavoidable series of lower beings, among which the labor of its individualization is slowly developed. It is only from the day when the Lord imprints on its forehead his august seal that the spirit takes its place within the ranks of humankind. (Genesis, Ch. VI, items 14, 15 and 19)
C. What are the planets composed of?
The cosmic matter condenses into the form of immense nebula. The universal laws that govern matter animate this nebula. Under those laws, notably the molecular force of attraction, it takes the shape of a spheroid, the only one that a mass of matter in insulated space can assume. The circular motion produced by gravity, exactly the same in all molecular zones towards the center, soon it modifies the primitive sphere to lead it, motion in motion, to the lenticular shape (we speak of the nebula as a whole).
Two new forces have emerged as a result of this movement of rotation: the centripetal force and centrifugal force, the former tending to bring all parties to the center, the latter tending to push them away. However, with the movement accelerating as the nebula condenses, and its radius increasing as it approaches the lenticular shape, the centrifugal force developed by these two endlessly causes soon prevails over the attraction at the center.
In the same way that a very rapid movement of the sling breaks the cord and sets the bullet free to a great distance, the predominance of the centrifugal force detaches the equatorial circle from the nebula and from this ring forms a new mass isolated from the first, but nevertheless subject to its control. This mass retains its equatorial motion, which when modified, will become its translational movement around the solar body. Furthermore, its new state gives it a rotation movement around its own center.
Thus, planets are formed from masses of condensed matter that has not yet solidified, detached from the central mass by the action of centrifugal force, and by virtue of the laws of movement, taking on a spheroid shape that is more or less elliptical, depending on the degree of fluidity they have kept. One of those planets will be Earth, which before cooling off and covered with a solid crust, will give birth to the moon through the same process of astral formation to which itself owes its own existence. (Genesis, Ch. VI, items 20 to 23)
