My boyfriend's eight year old son lives in Chile and has recently earned the honor of presenting a speech to classmates and city dignitaries. With the world's topics at his fingertips, the young scientist jumped out of the box, and off the Earth as it were, to discuss to his peers The Origin of the Universe. Sensing the ambition beyond this endeavor he decided to relax just a little and focus in specific on the creation of the Solar System.
Although the young mind does not need my assistance, he nevertheless asked politely for my advice on his research. I did not want to give him any aswers. The hardest, yet most important part of learning is finding the right questions to ask. I just hoped to aim his questions and curiousity in the right direction...
Compiling a short list of websites and animations, I helped steer his mighty quest with this letter, written in English and translated into Spanish by my language expert, Alejandro.
Janito,
I hear you earned a prestigious opportunity to show your classmates how smart you are! What an amazing adventure. And even more so because you choose one of the most difficult yet wondrous topics in the entire universe. Your speech will be 100% yours, but you know I love any opportunity to talk about the science of astronomy, and I hope I can help you in any way possible. There are great websites and videos available to you for research, and I have included a few to get you started. But maybe I can tell you a little story first...
Humans have always looked up with wonder at the sky above. Ancients believed the sun and moon to be gods, and that their movement through the stars influenced the growing of plants, the movement of the wind, even the lives of men. The stars were so important, professional astronomers watched the sky over hundreds of years, trying to unlock the secrets of the heavens.
Some of the things we have learned in the last in 7000 years...
The planets are not stars, they are more like us made of rock and gas. The word planet means "wandering star" because every night they move just a little across the "surface" of the sky.
The planets move in a line across the surface of the sky. It is like the equator but at a funny angle higher, or lower than the equator at different times of year.
The sun and moon also move along this line. Because of this, the line is called the Ecliptic because it is on this line that the sun and moon meet. This meeting is beautiful to watch from Earth, we call it the Eclipse. You can find this line if you look East and trace a line across the sky all the way to West.
For thousands of years humans thought that the sun, moon and planets are all moving around the earth because the earth is the center of the universe. This idea is called the Geocentric theory. If go out and look at the sky tonight, you can easily image why they thought this, it really does look like the sky is moving around us!
But, about 400 years ago, scientific observation showed us something new! A scientist named Copernicus noticed that the planets Mercury and Venus move very strange across our sky. Playing with the mathematics of their orbits, he imaged almost as a joke, "what if the sun was at the center of the solar system not the Earth?" He laughed, and so did many people, but the math was too good and some people stopped laughing and started looking up at the sky.
Galileo Galilei as one of the men who looked up. Using the spyglass that was used for war, he looked up to the sky to see what was out there. First he looked at the moon. He observed that the moon, like the earth, has big mountains and valleys. How did this happen? Then he looked at Jupiter, the biggest planet and saw that it had four orbiting stars of its own! The little moons were moving around Jupiter just like our Moon moves around Earth! "Hmm", he thought, "what if Copernicus is right and the sun is really at the center and all the planets, including Earth, move around it!?"
This was an amazing idea! Scientific observation was showing humans a very different world. A world tiny and distant from a giant, blazing hot sun. This idea became known as the Heliocentric model or... the Solar System.
And the rest of the story belongs to science. Many men and women have devoted their lives to understanding WHAT, HOW, WHEN, and WHY the solar system looks the way it does. Where did the sun come from? What are the stars made of? How do planets form? Why do some planets have moon and others do not? Are there more planets in universe? Is there maybe life on other planets?
Best of luck on your journey to explore the universe. The best way to talk to teach other people about something is to love whatever it is you are talking about. The stars are huge and the math that governs them is precise, but everyone can understand and love the sky if they stop, look, and think about what they see. And remember, we all look up at the same sky. Have fun!!
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