Thursday, December 3, 2009

Astronomy For Children.

By Colin Jones

Astronomy is a very exact branch of science, although many people become interested in it when they are very young. Astronomy is inspiring hobby that can teach children about the other sciences in general. Certain astronomical subjects inspire kids and movies like Star Wars and they only increase this attraction.

The Earth's nearest neighbour is the moon. Its journey around the Earth takes just over twenty-seven days to complete. Mankind has only ever set foot on the Earth and the moon. The gravity between the moon and Earth is responsible for the tides. Its brightness in the night sky encourages 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 very large, although it varies 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 provides 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!

The Earth is in the galaxy called the Milky Way. Like all other galaxies, it's a very large group of gas, dust, stars and planets. Most of the area in a galaxy is filled with nothing, just empty space. In other words, most of its volume, 3,000 light years high by 100,000 light years diameter, the size of our galaxy, is empty.

The Earth is situated somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 light years from the very centre 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 portion of it.

It looks like a pool of liquid, which is why it was named the Milky Way. There are four types of galaxies: elliptical, lenticular, irregular and, like our Milky Way, spiral.

There is a great deal 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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