Beyond Our Solar System: Universe Facts for Kids
When you look at stars, you see the past. The universe expands forever, but the Milky Way will merge with Andromeda Galaxy (not too soon though). There are neutron stars, black holes, rogue planets, and other wonders beyond our solar system. Universe facts worth sharing.
When you look at stars at night, you're looking back in time. The light you see left those stars years ago—sometimes hundreds or thousands of years ago. The farther you look into space, the farther back in time you're seeing. This means astronomers can watch the universe's history just by looking at distant objects.
And what they see is strange. The universe is expanding. Everything is moving apart from everything else, faster and faster. Galaxies that were once closer are now racing away. Scientists believe this expansion will continue forever, with galaxies drifting farther and farther into the darkness.
But not all galaxies are running away. The Andromeda Galaxy is racing toward us at 250,000 miles per hour. In about 4 billion years, it will crash into the Milky Way, and the two will merge into one massive galaxy. Our galaxy contains between 100 and 400 billion stars. Andromeda has about a trillion. When they combine, the night sky will look completely different.
Most of those stars have planets orbiting them. Some are stranger than anything in our solar system—planets made of diamond, planets where it rains glass sideways, planets that orbit so close to their stars that a year lasts only 8 hours. Others drift through space with no star at all, traveling alone through the void between solar systems.
Space is full of objects we can barely imagine. Neutron stars so dense that a teaspoon would weigh as much as Mount Everest, spinning hundreds of times per second. Black holes with gravity so strong that nothing—not rocks, not gas, not even light—can escape. The universe isn't just big. It's weird.
