What are shooting stars?

Shooting stars, or meteors,
are the streaks of light you sometimes
see at night.
They are made by pea-sized bits of rocks or metals
called meteoroids, which fall from space
and burn in the Earth’s atmosphere.

What is Halley’s Comet?

Comets are huge clouds of gas and dust,
much bigger than the Earth,
with a rocky core a few kilometers across.
Halley’s comet is named after the English scientist
Edmond Halley (1656-1742),
Who worked out that its orbit around the Sun
brings it close to Earth every 76 years.

Why do we need the Sun?

The Sun is a star.
It is like a blowing ball of hot gasses
producing a vast amount of energy which streams
through space in waves of light and heat.
This energy is essential to life on Earth.
Without it our planet would be so cold and dark
for plants and animals to survive.

The Sun is about 150 million km from Earth.
The Sun is made of a gas called Helium.
Much of the Sun is made of a gas called Hydrogen.

What is a satellite?

A satellite is something that orbits a planet.
Until the Space age began,
the Earth’s only satellite was the Moon.
Now it also has many artificial satellites-
machines which orbit it,
doing all sorts of jobs.
Some satellites relay TV and telephone signals.
Some study the stars,
others the Earth and its weather.

Why do stars twinkle?

It is the Earth’s atmosphere that makes stars twinkle.
On its way to Earth, starlight passes through bands
of warm and cold air in the atmosphere.
These heat currents make the stars flicker.

Why does the Moon change shape?

The Moon is lit by the Sun
and doesn’t give any light of its own.
However the Sun only lights half of the Moon,
Leaving the other half dark and invisible.
We can only see one face or side of the Moon from Earth,
Because we see this face from different angles
During the 29 1/2 days the Moon takes to orbit Earth.
Sometimes the Sun lights all of the face of the Moon that we see.
At other times only part is lit.

Why does the Sun rise?

Although we can’t feel it,
The earth is always moving.
It orbits, or goes round, the Sun,
And this journey takes a whole year.
At the same time the Earth itself is spinning-
one whole spin every 24 hours.
As the Earth spins, the Sun comes into view
And it seems to move across the sky.
The Earth spins from West to east,
So the Sun is in the East when we first see it in the morning,
and in the West when it sets in the evening.

Astronauts

People who travel into space are called astronauts.
They have to train for many years before their trip.
This astronaut wears a space suit to “walk” in space.

Spacecrafts

Rockets have been going into space for the last 40 years.
They have taken people as far as the moon.


Spacecrafts without people in them have visited distant planets such as Uranus and Neptune.
One American rocket called Apollo 11 took three people to the moon.

Stars

A star is a blazing ball of very hot gas.
The Sun is a star.

The Moon

The moon travels around the Earth.
The Earth travels around the sun.
The moon is very different form Earth.
There is no air and no life.
It is boiling hot during the day
and freezing at night.
The surface of the moon is covered
with sauce-shaped holes called craters.

How big is the sun?

It is huge!
It is 109 times as wide as the earth,
Or wider than the length of 15.000.000 football fields!
In fact the sun is big enough to hold 1 million Earth’s inside it!

Atmosphere

Most planets have an atmosphere –
a layer of gas that covers the surface.
The Earth’s atmosphere is made of air.
It stretches 400 km above us.
It also provides air to breathe,
And helps protect us from the sun’s heat.

Days and years

A day is the time it takes for a planet to spin around once.
Earth’s day lasts 24 hours.
A year is the time it takes for a planet to go all the way around the sun.
Earth’s year lasts 365 days.

Where do we live?

We live on planet Earth.
A planet is a large body that revolves around the sun.
Find Earth and the eight other planets in the picture. Many of the other planets have moons.
The sun, the nine known planets and their moons, and other objects that revolve around the sun make up the solar system.
The path an object takes as it revolves around the sun is called its orbit.

What is in our solar system?

Our solar system is the sun
and everything that revolves around it.
It includes all the planets and their moons,
and space objects such as comets.
There are also two vast bands of drifting rocks
called the Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt.

The Sun

The sun is a ball of hot, glowing gasses called plasma.
It is a star.
The sun looks larger and brighter than stars you see at night
because it is a lot closer to earth.
The other stars in the sky look smaller because they are so far away.