Astronomy For Children

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Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

Astronomy is a serious science. Many people get involved with it when they are very young. Astronomy for kids is a thought provoking pursuit that can teach them about the sciences in general. Kids naturally gravitate to many aspects of astronomy. These include the moon, the stars and far distant galaxies.

The Earth’s closest neighbor is the moon. It takes about 27 days to orbit the Earth. Because it is so close, it is the only space object that a human has ever walked on, other than Earth of course. The moon is important for the Earth because it causes the tides through gravitational forces between the Earth and the moon. It’s brightness in the night sky attracts many children to learn more about it and the overall subject of astronomy.

Consider Sol, our own star, the sun. Earth is quite far from the sun. The distance fluctuates between about 91 million miles and about 94 million miles. The reason for the variance is Earth’s elliptical orbit. Without the sun there would be no life on Earth. Our light and heat comes from the sun. Most people don’t realize that the sun accounts for around 98% of all the mass in the solar system. Talk about the big bully on the block.

Our own galaxy is the Milky Way. Like all other galaxies it’s a collection of gas, dust, stars and planets. Even with all this stuff to fill it, it’s mostly empty. That’s a lot of nothing because our galaxy is 100,000 light years across and 3,000 light years deep. The center of our galaxy is about 30,000 light years from Earth. The nothingness is broken up by over 100 billion stars. In fact the galaxy was named for the thick group of stars in the main portion of it. People thought it looked like a stream of milk, so called it the Milky Way. There are four types of galaxies – elliptical, lenticular, irregular and like the Milky Way, spiral.

Astronomy for kids is well covered online. In fact there are so many star charts, charting programs, images, videos, and other resources that a kid would be a senior citizen before seeing all of it.

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