Beautiful and mysterious, peaceful and serene, the moon is the brightest object in the night sky. Jupiter and Saturn have more than sixty moons each. Neptune has thirteen moons. Even Mars has two moons. But the Earth, our planet, only has one moon, our nearest neighbor in space. Even though the moon is close to us when compared to other planets, it is still very, very far away. The moon is about 239 thousand miles or 384 thousand kilometers away. You would have to travel all the way around the Earth nine and a half times to go the same distance as the space between the Earth and the Moon. The moon is much smaller than the Earth. Ifthe Earth was hollow, about fifty moons could fit inside. Because it is so much smaller than the Earth, the moon's gravity is much weaker. This means that if you were to visit the moon, you would weigh much less than you do on earth, only about 1/6th of your current weight. That means that if a giraffe was on...
Our Solar System - Have you ever looked up into the sky and wondered what was there? Higher than the birds, past the clouds, and farther than the moon, a whole host of fascinating objects spin in outer space. Let's imagine for a moment that we can leave the earth behind, and explore the solar system that surrounds it. We call it the solar system because everything in it is centered around the sun, and solar means something to do with the sun. The Sun The sun is a star, just like many of the stars that you can see in the night sky - just many times closer to us. Still, the sun is very, very far away from the earth; almost 93 millionmiles away: that's why it looks so small, even though it's the biggest object in the solar system. In fact, the sun makes up more than 99 percent of the mass in the solar system.If you put all of the planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and everything else in the solar system together, they would make up less than one quarter ...