Astronomy for Kids, Blast Off to Space!

Astronomy is a serious science. Many people get involved with it when they are very young. This exciting science can provide hours of learning, that’s why astronomy for kids is popular. Kids naturally gravitate to many aspects of astronomy. These include the moon, the stars and far distant galaxies. Our only natural satellite is called the moon. It takes about 27 days to orbit the Earth. Mankind has only ever walked on the Earth and the moon. Gravity between the moon and Earth causes the tides. 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. Then there’s our sun. The sun is a long way away from us. The distance fluctuates between about 91 million miles and about 94 million miles. That’s because Earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a circle, it’s an ellipse. If there were no sun, we wouldn’t be alive. The sun provides both light and heat to the

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planet. Over 98% of the total stuff in our solar system is in the sun. Talk about the big bully on the block. Our sun and solar system reside in a galaxy called 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. We’re somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 light years from galactic central core. Even with all that space there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. The galaxy’s name comes from the many stars near the center. It looks like a pool of liquid, thus the name “Milky Way.” 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 on the Internet. Kids could spend hours wrapped in detailed 3D representations of the universe around us.

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