Astronomy For Kids - Learn While Having Fun

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Astronomy For Kids - Learn While Having Fun

Friday, June 19th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

Astronomy is a serious science. And as with many things, even very serious things, people often get an early start. There are a lot of resources for astronomy for kids who are interested in the planets, the solar system, the universe and everything else that’s part of this exciting science. Kids naturally gravitate to many aspects of astronomy. These include the moon, the stars and far distant galaxies.

The moon is Earth’s only satellite. It orbits our planet once every 27.3 days. 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 one of the first objects that can spark a kid’s interest in astronomy because it can be clearly seen with the human eye.

Let’s move to the another subject of this kids astronomy - sun. The gap between our home and the sun is very large. We are between 91 and 94 million miles from the sun. That’s because Earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a circle, it’s an ellipse. Life on Earth is only possible because of the sun. Our light and heat comes from the sun. Over 98% of the total stuff in our solar system is in the sun. What a hog.

Our own galaxy is the Milky Way. Just as other galaxies, ours contains gas and clouds of dust, stars and planets and other space materials. Most of the area in a galaxy is filled with nothing, just empty space. That means most of 3,000 light years high by 100,000 light years wide, the size of our galaxy, is empty. Our sun is over 30,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. 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. From Earth it looks like a Milky Way, a large pool of milk. It’s a spiral galaxy, one of four major types of galaxies in the universe. The others are elliptical, lenticular and irregular.

There is a lot of information about astronomy for kids online. From dictionaries and encyclopedic references, to programs, books and toys that show different planets, solar systems and objects right on the computer, there’s more information than a kid would ever read.

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