Hey kids. You know the sun is a star, but did you also know it’s about 150 million kilometers away? 150 million kilometers. Wow! The sun was formed around 4.6 billion years ago from a cloud of helium and hydrogen atoms and tiny specs of dust. Gravity squished all of those atoms and particles together and kept squeezing it until they got hotter and hotter and then something amazing happened. Gravity squished hydrogen atoms together enough to make new helium atoms. That’s called hydrogen fusion and there were so many atoms fusing that it released huge amounts of energy in the form of light and heat and that is still happening today, over 4 billion years later. How hot is the sun? On the surface, it’s 5 or 6,000 degrees Celsius, but at its core, temperatures are as high as 50 million degrees. That’s our amazing grandfather, the sun.

How many moons are in our solar system? Well I don’t know, but the earth has one. It’s about 380,000 kilometres away and takes just over 27 days to orbit around us. Mars has two moons. Jupiter and Saturn have at least 53 moons each and maybe more. Uranus has at least 27 moons and Neptune has 14 that we know of. That’s a lot of moons. Our moon goes around the earth and we go around the sun and every once in a while, the moon is in just the right position to block out the sun and that’s what we call a solar eclipse. The moon spins on its axis just like the earth does, but the spin is slowed (unclear) so that we only ever see one side of the moon. Thank you grandmother moon for lighting the night.