The next-closest star after the Sun is trillions of kilometres away.
Even light, the fastest thing there is, takes years to reach us from it. That is why the other stars look so tiny at night.
💡 Mặt trời, mặt trăng, sao — Fun Facts
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The Sun's surface is about 5,500 degrees — super hot!
That is much hotter than an oven or a campfire. Its heat travels all the way across space to warm our planet.
The Sun is really a star, just very close to us.
Other stars look tiny because they are so far away. The Sun looks big and bright because it is our nearest star.
The Moon's shape seems to change a little each night.
Sometimes it looks round and full, and sometimes like a thin curve. These changing shapes are called the phases of the Moon.
Stars twinkle because their light wobbles through our air.
A star's light passes through moving air before it reaches us. The wiggling air makes the star seem to sparkle and blink.
The Moon has no light of its own — it reflects the Sun.
Sunlight shines on the Moon and bounces back to us. That is why the Moon glows so brightly at night.
The Sun is a giant ball of hot, glowing gas.
It is not solid like the ground under your feet. It is made of gas that glows and gives us light and warmth.
A single teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh billions of tons.
A neutron star is what's left after a giant star collapses. Its material is squeezed together so tightly that just one teaspoonful would weigh about as much as a whole mountain.
The Moon moves a tiny bit farther from Earth every year.
The Moon drifts away from us by about 3.8 cm each year — roughly the speed your fingernails grow. Very slowly, this is also making Earth's days a little bit longer over millions of years.
There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on all the world's beaches.
Astronomers estimate there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each holding billions of stars. Added up, the number of stars is far greater than every grain of sand on every beach on Earth.
It takes about 8 minutes for sunlight to travel from the Sun to Earth.
Light is the fastest thing in the universe, yet the Sun is so far away (about 150 million km) that its light still takes roughly 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach us. We always see the Sun as it looked a few minutes ago.
The Sun is so big that about 1.3 million Earths could fit inside it.
The Sun holds about 99.8% of all the mass in our Solar System. It's a giant ball of hot glowing gas, and its gravity is what keeps every planet circling around it.