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    The Everything Kids' Astronomy Book: Blast into outer space with stellar facts, intergalatic trivia, and out-of-this-world puzzles
    The Everything Kids' Astronomy Book: Blast into outer space with stellar facts, intergalatic trivia, and out-of-this-world puzzles
    The Everything Kids' Astronomy Book: Blast into outer space with stellar facts, intergalatic trivia, and out-of-this-world puzzles
    Ebook239 pages2 hours

    The Everything Kids' Astronomy Book: Blast into outer space with stellar facts, intergalatic trivia, and out-of-this-world puzzles

    By Kathi Wagner and Sheryl Racine

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    About this ebook

    Explore the galaxies!

    Aliens, space ships, and constellations, oh my! Ride on a rocket ship to another galaxy with this stellar book. With The Everything Kids' Astronomy Book, astronomers-in-training will learn:
    • How galaxies like the Milky Way were built.
    • Why the sun's surface is 20,000-50,000-degrees Fahrenheit.
    • Why the earth spins and how gravity works.
    • What comets and asteroids are made of and how they affect planets.
    • The truth about the man in the moon.
    • Why Mars is so hot and what those rings around Saturn are.
    • What scientists think about aliens and life in outer space

    If you want to build a sky-watching kit or change your room into a small universe, this book will take you on a journey that is out-of-this-world!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateApr 1, 2008
    ISBN9781605501741
    The Everything Kids' Astronomy Book: Blast into outer space with stellar facts, intergalatic trivia, and out-of-this-world puzzles
    Author

    Kathi Wagner

    An Adams Media author.

    Read more from Kathi Wagner

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      Book preview

      The Everything Kids' Astronomy Book - Kathi Wagner

      The Everything Kids’ Astronomy Book cover

      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

      Avon, Massachusetts

      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 everything.com® are registered trademarks of F+W Publications, Inc.

      Published by Adams Media, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

      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

      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.

      —From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the

      American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations

      Cover illustrations by Dana Regan.

      Interior illlustrations by Kurt Dolber.

      Puzzles by Beth L. Blair.

      See the entire Everything® series at www.everything.com.

      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

      9781598695441_0010_001

      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. [Answer]

      9781598695441_0012_001Words 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

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