As you probably know we are on a small rock orbiting  the sun in space. what you most likely dont know is how that ties in to stars and galaxies. we orbit the sun along with 7 other planets: mercury, Venus, mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The earth has on body orbiting it, the moon. the moon orbits the earth once every 28 days. in this illustration the white area on the moon and the earth is sunlight reflecting off the surfacethe moon does not produce any of its own light, all light is reflected from the sun. This is true for all planets, moons, asteroids, and comets. Stars are different, they produce their own light as discussed in a later installment.

     when you look up in the sky and see all the stars you are really looking at many distant suns. indeed all stars are actually distance suns don’t think I need to describe how far away they are! The nearest star is somewhere like 12,000,000,000,000(twelve trillion) miles away. the sun is about one million times bigger than earth. there are stars millions of times bigger than our star, the sun. the sun is one of the smallest stars in the sky. it just appears so bog because it is so close.

    if the sun has 8 planets wouldn’t it make since to think other stars would have planets as well? in the 1990s, the first planets orbiting other stars were found. since then we have found over 500! it appears as though most stars have planets. If earth has life on it, and there are planets around most stars wouldn’t that imply that life is common in the cosmos?

   all stars form collections called galaxies, witch will be talked about in a few installments. Over all we are not in  any special place in the universe. We are orbiting a unnoticeable star orbiting a lost galaxy, in the fabric of space and time.