SHOOTING STARS
The UK-China Leonid Meteor Shower
Observation Project

BING-BING AND THE SHOOTING STARS

Continued...

"But we aren't the only planet. The Sun has a family of nine planets, some bigger than ours, some smaller, and they all go around the Sun like we do. We call this family the SOLAR SYSTEM.

"Just as you are different from your Mummy and Daddy, but still a panda, so the planets are all different from each other, but they are still planets. The Earth is 13,000 kilometres across, and 43,000 kilometers round. Imagine how long it would take you to walk all the way round the Earth, at about 5 kilometres an hour - walking speed - and it seems to us to be very big. But compared to some planets it is quite small. Jupiter is ten times wider and a thousand times larger than Earth. It is nearly 650 million miles away from the Sun, and it takes 12 years to go round the Sun once. This means that for every twelve birthdays you have on Earth, you would only have one on Jupiter. On the other hand, Mercury is only 4880 kilometres across, and is much closer to the Sun. It is very hot, and goes round the Sun in 88 days. So for every birthday you have on Earth, you would have four on Mercury!

"Every planet is a world, but ours is the only world in the solar system where there are any pandas or other living things. Everywhere else is either too hot, ot too cold; either it has no atmosphere, or its atmosphere is poisonous to us. We have nowhere else to go, so we must look after the Earth, as it is our only home.

"But, what about the Busy Sky, Mummy?" asked Bing-Bing.

"When you look up into the sky on a dark clear night, you can see that it isn't empty. The sky is a very busy place. All sorts of things are going on, up there beyond where the air reaches. Down here we can feel the air as the wind, and we can breath it in and out. But if we could go high enough we would find there is no air. We call the air the "atmosphere". It covers the whole world and keeps the planet warm, as well as protecting us from space and the things in space.

"Out beyond the atmosphere you can see the MOON. This moves across the sky, from night to night, towards the east changing its shape as it does so, from a crescent to a circle and back again, regularly during the month.

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