The Earth’s closest neighbor is the moon.  Its path around the Earth takes just over twenty seven days to complete.  Mankind has only ever walked on the Earth and the moon.  The moon is important for the Earth because it causes the tides through gravitational forces between the Earth and the moon.  It’s brightness in the night sky attracts many children to learn more about it and the overall subject of astronomy.

Then there’s our sun.  Earth is quite far from the sun.  We are between 91 and 94 million miles from the sun.  That’s because Earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a circle, it’s an ellipse.  Life on Earth is only possible because of the sun.  The sun provides both light and heat to the planet.  Most people don’t realize that the sun accounts for around 98% of all the mass in the solar system.  What a hog.

Our sun and solar system reside in a galaxy called the Milky Way.  It’s full of space stuff.  But most of the galaxy is empty nothingness.  That’s a lot of nothing because our galaxy is 100,000 light years across and 3,000 light years deep.  Our sun is over 30,000 light years from the center of the galaxy.  The nothingness is broken up by over 100 billion stars.  In fact the galaxy takes its name from the appearance of the band of stars that shine from the main section of the galaxy.  It looks like a pool of liquid, thus the name “Milky Way.”  It’s a spiral galaxy, one of four major types of galaxies in the universe.  The others are elliptical, lenticular and irregular.

Astronomy for kids is well covered online.  From dictionaries and encyclopedic references, to programs that show different planets, solar systems and objects right on the computer, there’s more information than a kid would ever read.