What's about night sky?
We all love the sophisticated experience of studying the sky using binoculars and the powers of different sizes and telescopes. But I'm sure you will remember as a child the first time you saw the night sky, which was fully displayed with all the amazing stars, meters and comets and so many light points to count. Saw a lot of exposure.
The best way to recapture the wonder of that moment is to go to the country with your own child or someone who has never had this experience and say the most powerful words they can see at that moment. He was the only one who could capture the feeling of seeing that glorious sky. That word is "wow".
Perhaps the most unusual fact about what a child sees is that it is very difficult for them to understand what is above them and what it represents. Almost certainly, almost every point in the sky is another star or celestial body much larger than Earth, not twice or tens of times, but by hundreds and thousands of factors, the idea of moving the mind. Children toddlers have a hard time imagining the size of the earth, nothing more than a vast area like outer space.
But when it comes to astronomy, we do better when we are immersed in a deeper and deeper level of awe over what we see in the night sky. Some surprising facts about what kids are looking at when they look up at the sky can add to the goose bumps they already have in front of them. Facts like ...
* Our Sun is part of a vast galaxy called the Milky Way, which contains hundreds of billions of stars or larger. Show them that one hundred billion means 100,000,000,000,000, and you will definitely see the jaw drop.
* The Milky Way is one of tens of billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars. In fact, the Milky Way is one of the smallest galaxies.
* If you want to cross the Milky Way, it will take you 100,000 years. But you can not get there by enforcing the speed limit. You have to travel five trillion, eight hundred million miles a year to overcome that high speed.
* Scientists estimate that the Milky Way is 14 billion years old.
These little fun facts about the origins of the universe and the possibility of space travel or whether there is life on other planets deserve a very lively discussion. If each star in the galaxy supports nine planets and only one of them is habitable as Earth, you can challenge the children to calculate how much life there is on one of them. I hope you see some real excitement when they try to play those numbers.
This type of discussion is fun, exciting and full of questions. It's the birth of a lifelong love of astronomy that they enjoy, so do not be too quick to close their imaginations. And if you were in the first moment when they looked up at the sky that night, you could experience your own great moment again as a kid. And it may provoke new enthusiasm about astronomy in all of you again.
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