by Kathi Wagner
THE
EVERYTHING®
KIDS’
ASTRONOMY
BOOK
Blast into outer space with stellar facts,
intergalactic trivia, and out-of-this-world puzzles
Kathi Wagner and Sheryl Racine
DIRECTOR OF INNOVATION Paula Munier
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Laura M. Daly
EXECUTIVE EDITOR, series books Brielle K. Matson
ASSOCIATE COPY CHIEF Sheila Zwiebel
ACQUISITIONS EDITOR Kerry Smith
DEVELOPMENT EDITOR Katie McDonough
PRODUCTION EDITOR Casey Ebert
Copyright©2008, F+W Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews and photocopies made for classroom use.
An Everything® Series Book.
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Published by Adams Media, an F+W Publications Company
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www.adamsmedia.com
ISBN 10: 1-59869-544-4
ISBN 13: 978-1-59869-544-1
Printed in the United States of America.
J I H G F E D C B A
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional advice. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.
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Cover illustrations by Dana Regan.
Interior illlustrations by Kurt Dolber.
Puzzles by Beth L. Blair.
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Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Universe and Beyond
More Than Meets the Eye
Countless Galaxies
Round and Round They Go
Observing Other Worlds
What Goes Up…
You’ll Get a “Bang” Out of This
Chapter 2: The Sun, the Center of Our Solar System
Too Hot to Handle
A Source of Energy
The Air You Breathe
Sunrise, Sunset
Keeping Track of Time
Are You Scared of the Dark?
Chapter 3: Home Sweet Home, Planet Earth
You Get a Line and I’ll Get a Pole
Our Living Planet
There’s No Place Like It
What Time Is It Anyway?
Predicting the Unpredictable
Chapter 4: Our Neighbor the Moon
The Man in the Moon
Rings and Craters
Now You See It, Now You Don’t
Making Waves
By the Light of the Moon
On the Far Side of the Moon
What Is a Satellite?
Blast Off
Chapter 5: Closest to the Sun
Mercury, a Planet Baked by the Sun
Venus, Lost in the Clouds
Mars, the Bright Red Planet
Giant Jupiter
What You See Is What You Get
What’s in a Name?
Chapter 6: The Outer Limits
Saturn’s Fascinating Rings
Uranus, the Tilted Planet
Stormy Neptune
The Mystery of Pluto
Planet X
Making It Clear!
Chapter 7: Space Oddities
In the Blink of an Eye
The Sky Is Falling
Seeing in the Dark
Misplaced in Space
Showers from the Sky
A Tale of a Tail
Chapter 8: Starry, Starry, Night
Diamonds in the Sky
Connecting the Dots
What’s a Planetarium?
Naming Your Own Star
The First Star I See Tonight!
Happy Birthday to You
Mapping the Stars
Chapter 9: Is There Anybody Out There?
Phone Calls to Outer Space
Unidentified Flying Objects
Unsolved Alien Mysteries Here on Earth
Cool Jobs
If They Won’t Come to Us, We’ll Go to Them!
Home Away from Home
An Endless Mission
Appendix A: Glossary
Appendix B: Resources
Appendix C: Puzzle Answers
DEDICATION
To Marcia, who believes.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mrs. Blomstedt for taking the time to share the skies,
and for quenching our endless thirst for knowledge.
Introduction
Blast off to a new world with The Everything® Kids’ Astronomy Book! Every chapter offers a new adventure with places never before touched by humans and others that have never been seen, yet they are all out there just waiting for you. Page by page you can discover what lies beyond the world you know so well, and maybe even who might be out there, if anyone. So grab a friend and prepare to launch your way to nearby planets or faraway galaxies.
Will you choose to go where no one else dares to go, like the mysterious black holes and potential time warps? Or how about taking an eighty-year journey with a comet? Maybe you can solve all the unanswered questions of time and space and why light travels the way that it does. There are tons of activities to explore space and to see how it feels to float free of gravity. Your journey into space starts inside this book where you and your family and friends will find games and activities that will challenge your mind and your skills as astronomers and astronauts. Together you can cook up edible planets, create your own black holes, and possibly invent a new type of candy bar. Or maybe you will want to invent your own alien or become stars. Who knows, you may be the one to solve the mystery of dark matter or find where the universe starts or stops.
In the pages of this book you will find information on how to build your own sky-watching kit and how to change your room into a small universe. You can also find out why people thought the sun circled the earth and how they discovered the truth. Each chapter is jam-packed with plenty of questions you can use to stump your friends while you explore the skies and rocket away to endless galaxies. For fun, you can experience the life of an astronaut first hand at your own astronaut party. Together you can travel through time to a place few people have gone, and learn what the future may hold for everyone who lives in our universe.
Before you are through, you can take a trip to the far side of the moon, discover what makes Neptune so stormy, and explore the world of the extraterrestrial to see why some people think aliens could exist. It will be easy to impress your friends and family as you learn how to locate stars and the many other things in the sky. Everyone will enjoy tasting a part of space when you make an edible planet. And who wouldn’t like spending some time outside under the stars? So get out your blanket, find a pair of binoculars, and join in the
fun of unraveling the mysteries of space!
Chapter 1
The Universe and Beyond
One of the first songs many children learn to sing is “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” but have you ever thought about the second line in the song: “How I wonder what you are?” Long before you knew what a star really was, you could see them shining in the sky at night. If you have ever tried to count all those stars, you probably guessed that there were a few hundred of them.
FUN FACT
Can You Name These Tunes?
Did you know that the song “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” has the same tune as the Alphabet song? For fun you could hum the tune and ask different people what song they think it is.
More Than Meets the Eye
One way to count all the stars in the universe would be to count so many each night, but don’t expect to find them in the same place at the same time. If two weeks have gone by, start looking for them an hour earlier. Many years ago people noticed that the stars seemed to be in different places from time to time, so they believed that the stars were circling our earth. Now scientists know that as the earth moves in its orbit around the sun, different areas of the sky are revealed. The North Star is the only star in the Northern Hemisphere that does not move as clusters of stars circle around it.
Some people also began to wonder what might lie beyond the stars that they could see. As they studied the stars, they came to believe that the universe, the space around them, was composed of billions of star groups and each of these groups also contained billions of stars. Some scientists wondered, could there be even more stars? Could there be another universe beyond this one?
WORDS to KNOW
UNIVERSE: The universe is everything around us as far as the eye can see. It contains stars, galaxies, planets, space, and us. Some people think there are other universes that go on beyond the one where we live.
Long Ago
If you find it hard to believe that there are so many stars in the universe, just think about the number of people that live on our world. You know there are only a few people in your family and not many people live in your hometown. When you watch television, you see there are many people in other countries around the world, but does it seem possible that there are billions of people on our world since you never see all of them? Did you ever ride in a plane and as it flew higher and higher, discover how much more of the world you could see? It was always there, just like our universe, but you couldn’t see it! If you asked a grownup why the plane stayed up in the air, he might have told you how he thought it worked or joked about his super powers holding it up there! You wouldn’t believe that story or myth, but people living thousands of years ago believed that their gods were controlling everything here on Earth and in the skies. Some thought that a god rode the sun as it traveled across the sky; others named the stars and planets after their gods, and even referred to them as “heavenly bodies,” as many people still do today. Each country developed its own myths. Some even made up stories about the shapes formed by the clusters of stars in the sky.
Imagine what your friends would say if you announced that a god lived on the moon and made the moon increase in size when it rose above the horizon and then made it shrink when it was high in the sky. Can you think of other myths you could tell each other? It does seem almost more like a story than something real, when you think about a universe born billions of years ago. Although the universe has been around for a long time, scientists think it may have formed very fast. Because the universe is constantly expanding, even the best experts can only guess how big the universe is or what shape it may be. Traveling millions and millions of light years to find the answers may take some time, but technology is getting us closer and closer each day. How big or what shape do you think the universe is?
Going Backwards?
Scientists call the start of the universe “The Big Bang.” What do they call the theory that when the universe ends it will collapse in on itself? To learn this name, color in the letters that are not Z, Y, or X. Then read the dark letters from left to right, and top to bottom.
WORDS to KNOW
ASTRONOMY: Astronomy is the study of all things in space. The people who watch the skies for new stars or planets or changes in the ones that have already been discovered are called astronomers. Astronomy is a type of science.
The Big Picture
One way to see the world from a bird’s-eye view is to visit a Web site that shows your town and house from space. At Web sites such as www.terrafly.com, you can view your house from the sky! The picture starts out above your town like a bird or the pilot of a plane might see it. As the picture zooms in closer, you can see each house and the cars parked close by. To see this type of aerial map you can type in the words “aerial map” into your search box. Many of the sites offer you a chance to zoom in from space to your neighborhood or school. Another way to imagine how big the universe is would be to take a map of your country and mark where you live on the map with a piece of chalk. Although your town may seem large to you, on most maps that cover large areas it will just be a dot. In a map of the universe, our planet would also be a small dot.
How Big Is Big?
Astronomers figure that the universe has about 100 billion galaxies. If each galaxy has 100 billion stars, that adds up to a HUGE number—10 sextillion stars! Think about it this way: Ten thousand is a 10 followed by three zeroes, and ten million is a 10 followed by six zeroes. To find out how many zeroes are in 10 sextillion, break this number substitution (A=1, B=2, etc.) code.
Try This
Glow-in-the-Dark Galaxy
You can make your own spiral galaxy using a pinwheel and painting glow-in-the-dark or glitter paint on the top edges of each blade. Once it is dry, blow on the wheel to see how a spiral galaxy moves. If you used glow-in-the-dark paint, try it in a dark room. This is how our galaxy would look to someone out in space.
Countless Galaxies
Have you ever seen the Milky Way? This collection of stars can be seen all over the world; it looks like a ring of milk spilled across the sky. It is a small part of Earth’s own Milky Way Galaxy, which contains billions of stars, and you can see it with your own two eyes. If you could see it from another galaxy, it would look like a pinwheel that rotates every couple of hundred million years. Other galaxies may look like a racetrack or a splatter of paint. Did you know that if someone gave you a penny and then doubled that amount each day, you would soon have more money than you could ever spend? The same is true for our galaxies; there are just too many to be counted.
Sailing, Sailing
The Milky Way Galaxy and other galaxies in the universe display many of the bright stars that sailors in ancient times used like the map your family uses when you go on vacation. These early stargazers were the first people to practice astronomy; they were studying the universe, although they could only see the brightest stars and a few of the planets. Today, sailors can travel over the seas using instruments that focus on the stars to guide them. If you are lucky enough to know someone that sails a boat, ask if they will show you how their instruments work.
WORDS to KNOW
GALAXY: A galaxy is a group of stars out in space. There are numerous galaxies in the universe. The galaxy we live in is a spiral galaxy. Galaxies can come in different shapes and sizes.
In the Neighborhood?
You may have heard of the Andromeda Galaxy, because it is fairly close to Earth, less than three million light years away. It can be seen without using binoculars on a clear night! Check your friends’ knowledge of astronomy. Ask if they have ever heard of the two dwarf galaxies that can only be seen if you are in the Southern Hemisphere. They are known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and seem to be held in place by the Milky Way’s gravity! All of these galaxies, including the Milky Way, are part of what is known as the Local Group. Visit your local library and see how far away some of the distant galaxies would be! Weren’t you surprised how many were scattered t
hroughout the universe?
A Closer Look
Like the early astronomers, you may need to practice moving your binoculars closer or farther away from your eyes until you can see clearly. If you know someone who owns a pair of binoculars, ask them if they will let you look through them in the daytime. Can you see a street sign or a building that is far away from you? What is the smallest thing that you can recognize?
Round and Round They Go
Do you ever say the sun is “coming up”? It really does seem like the sun is traveling around our earth. The Greek astronomer, Ptolemy, thought the same thing almost 2,000 years ago; many centuries later, a stargazer named Copernicus claimed that our planet really circled or made an orbit around the sun! Each month you can see the shape of the moon change, but around 400 hundred years ago, a famous astronomer called Galileo was watching the changing shape of the planet Venus! This proved to him that it did revolve around the sun. You can go on the Internet and find pictures of Venus and learn when it would be the best time to view this phenomenon. Sometimes you can see it by using only a pair of binoculars. You probably already knew that the planets circle around the sun and that many of them have moons and rings that circle around them. But, did you know that our sun circles around the center of our galaxy? With so many things moving around here on Earth and out in the universe it is amazing so few things collide.
Just for Fun
The Revolving Game
To do this activity you will need several children to be planets and moons. One person can be Earth, another will be the moon, another will be the sun, and others will be the other planets. Once you have everyone in place, start revolving. (The sun stands in the center, the planets spin and revolve around the sun, and any planets’ moons revolve around them.) Remember that Earth will be spinning at the same time it is circling the sun. Now try trading places and do it again.
