The Sun and Moon 1

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The Sun and Moon 1

When you look into the sky during the day, you cannot miss the sun. Even on a cloudy day, the sun’s light spreads across our planet, Earth. The sun is just an ordinary star among the more than one hundred billion stars, but it is the star that is the center of our solar system. The sun is much bigger than Earth. In fact, it could hold 1.3 million Earths if it were hollow. At night, you can see the moon. It seems to light up the night sky, but the moon is only reflecting sunlight. In fact, we can see only part of the moon lit by sunlight. When the Earth’s shadow passes over the moon during each month, the moon goes through phases of an all-dark new moon, to a crescent moon, to a full moon. The moon is only about a quarter of Earth’s size and much, much smaller than the sun.

The Sun and Moon 2

The sun and the moon are the two bodies in space that we can see most clearly from Earth, but they are very different. The sun is a massive ball of exploding gasses that burns anything that comes too close to it. It applies a pulling force called gravity to everything within a range of 4,000 million miles. Without the sun, there would be no life on Earth. There would be no heat, no light, no clouds, and no you! The moon orbits the Earth, which orbits the sun. Instead of a fiery ball of gasses, the moon is cold and barren. Its surface is rocky and dusty with mountains and craters. The moon has no atmosphere to protect it so the sun’s rays can make the temperature hotter than boiling water. When the sun is not shining on the moon, the temperature is colder than any place on Earth.

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