Astronomy is a very exact science, although a lot of people get involved with it when they are quite young. Astronomy is a thought-provoking pursuit that can teach children about the sciences in general. A number of astronomical subjects interest kids and movies like Star Wars and they only serve to increase this attraction.
The Earth’s nearest neighbour is the moon. Its orbit around the Earth takes just over twenty-seven days to complete. Mankind has only ever walked on the Earth and the moon. The gravity between the moon and Earth causes the tides. Its brightness in the night sky attracts many children to want to study more about it and the subject of astronomy in general.
Consider Sol, our own star, the sun. The distance between our home and the sun is huge, although it fluctuates from 91 to 94 million miles. The reason for the variance is the Earth’s elliptical orbit. If there were no sun, we wouldn’t be alive. The sun delivers both light and heat to the planets. A little known fact is that the sun contains about 98% of the mass in the solar system. That is massive!
We live in the galaxy called the Milky Way. Like all other galaxies it’s a collection of gas, dust, stars and planets. Most of the area in a galaxy is filled with nothing, just empty space. That means that most of its volume, 3,000 light years high by 100,000 light years diameter, the volume of our galaxy, is empty.
The Earth is situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of 30,000 light years from the central core of our galaxy. The emptiness is broken up by over 100 billion stars. In fact, the galaxy was named for the thick group of stars in the main section of it.
It looks just like a pool of liquid, which is why it was given the name Milky Way. There are four types of galaxies: elliptical, lenticular, irregular and, like the Milky Way, spiral.
There is a lot of information about astronomy that is fit for children on the Internet: from dictionaries and encyclopaedic references to programs that show different planets, solar systems and objects right on the computer’s monitor! In fact, there’s more information than a child could ever read.
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