Everything Kids' Astronomy Book
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.
Everything
®
and
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®
are registered trademarks of F+W Publications, Inc.
Published by Adams Media, an F+W Publications Company
57 Littlefield Street, Avon, MA 02322. U.S.A.
www.adamsmedia.com
ISBN 10: 1-59869-544-4
ISBN 13: 978-1-59869-544-1
Printed in the United States of America.
JÂ Â Â IÂ Â Â HÂ Â Â GÂ Â Â FÂ Â Â EÂ Â Â DÂ Â Â CÂ Â Â BÂ Â Â 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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jointly adopted by a Committee of the
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Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. When those designations appear in this book and Adams Media was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.
Cover illustrations by Dana Regan.
Interior illlustrations by Kurt Dolber.
Puzzles by Beth L. Blair.
This book is available at quantity discounts for bulk purchases.
For information, please call 1-800-289-0963.
See the entire Everything
®
series at
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Contents
Chapter 1: The Universe and Beyond
You'll Get a “Bang” Out of This
Chapter 2: The Sun, the Center of Our Solar System
Chapter 3: Home Sweet Home, Planet Earth
You Get a Line and I'll Get a Pole
Chapter 4: Our Neighbor the Moon
Mercury, a Planet Baked by the Sun
Chapter 8: Starry, Starry, Night
Chapter 9: Is There Anybody Out There?
Unsolved Alien Mysteries Here on Earth
If They Won't Come to Us, We'll Go to Them!
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
B
last 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
O
ne 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.