Astronomy For Children.

Astronomy is a serious science and as with many things, even very serious things, people often get in at an early age. This exciting science can provide hours of learning, that’s why astronomy is popular with kids. Kids naturally gravitate to many aspects of astronomy, including the moon, the stars and far distant galaxies.

The Earth’s closest neighbour is the moon. Its path around the Earth takes just over twenty seven days to complete. Mankind has only ever walked on the Earth and the moon. Gravity between the moon and Earth causes the tides. It’s brightness in the night sky attracts many children to learn more about it and the overall subject of astronomy.

Then there’s our sun. Earth is quite far from the sun. The distance fluctuates between about 91 million miles and about 94 million miles, although these measurements are not completely accurate. They are inaccurate measurements, because the Earth orbits the sun in an uneven ellipse. Life on Earth is only possible because of the sun, because it provides us with important elements such as light and heat. It is not a well-known fact that the sun contains about 98% of all the mass available in the solar system. Think about how small a person is compared to that – it is truly imponderable!

We live in the galaxy of the Milky Way. It’s full of the material of which space consists, although 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 the galactic central core. The nothingness is broken up by over 100 billion stars. In fact the galaxy takes its name from the appearance of the band of stars that shines from the main section of the galaxy. People thought it looked like a stream of milk and so called it the Milky Way. It’s a spiral galaxy, one of the four major types of galaxies in the universe. The other types are elliptical, lenticular and irregular.

There is a lot of information about astronomy fit for children on the Internet. From dictionaries and encyclopedic references to programs that show different planets, solar systems and objects right on the computer! There’s more information than a child could ever read.