Planets, stars, and space
❓ Which planet is largest?
✅ Jupiter! It's so massive, all other planets could fit inside it!
❓ Why does the Moon change shape?
✅ The Moon doesn't actually change! We see different lit portions as it orbits Earth!
❓ What is the Sun made of?
✅ The Sun is a giant ball of hydrogen and helium gas — undergoing nuclear fusion!
🌟 Fun Fact!
If you could drive to the Moon at highway speed (60 mph), it would take about 160 days! 🌙
Space captures children's attention more reliably than almost any other science topic, and it carries genuinely difficult ideas about scale, motion, and light that repay careful teaching.
Scale is the hardest part. Textbook diagrams necessarily show planets close together and similar in size, which builds a picture of the solar system that is dramatically wrong.
Eight. Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006 because it has not cleared its orbital neighbourhood, which is one of the criteria the International Astronomical Union adopted.
It does not. We see different amounts of its sunlit half depending on where it is in its orbit around Earth, which produces the cycle of phases over about twenty-nine and a half days.
Because Earth's axis is tilted about 23.5 degrees. Each hemisphere leans toward the sun for part of the year, receiving more direct sunlight for longer, which is what causes summer.