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Astronomy For Teens.
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Astronomy is a very exact branch of science, although a lot of people get involved with it when they are quite young. Astronomy is inspiring hobby that can teach children about the other sciences in general. Some astronomical subjects interest kids and movies like Star Wars and they serve to increase this interest.
The Earth’s nearest neighbour is the moon. Its orbit around the Earth takes a little 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 learn 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 delivers 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!
Our planet is in the galaxy called the Milky Way. Like all other galaxies it’s a very large collection of gas, dust, stars and planets. Most of the area in a galaxy is filled with nothing, just empty space. That means that 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 neighbourhood of 30,000 light years from the central core 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 section of it.
It resembles a pool of liquid, which is why it was named the Milky Way. There are four kinds of galaxies: elliptical, lenticular, irregular and, like the Milky Way, spiral.
There is a lot of information on astronomy on the Internet that is suitable for children: from dictionaries and encyclopaedic references to programs that show the paths of the different planets, solar systems and objects right on the computer’s monitor! In deed, there’s more information than a child could ever get through.
