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Games
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Picture Sudoku (Click and Print)
Ice Age Animal Sudoku
Word Searches (Click and Print)
Ancient Treasures
California Native Plants
Spelling Bee (Click and Print)
Ice Age Animal Spelling Bee
Coloring Book (Click and Print)
American Mastodon
Ancient Bison
Scavenger Hunt (Click and Print)
Download our Field Journal form before your visit, then draw and sort animals you will find in the Western Center.
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Poll Answer
The distance from the Earth to the Sun (the Sun's name is "Sol") is about 93 million miles! Astronomers call this an astronomical unit, or AU for short. That's so far that even travelling at light speed, it would take 8 minutes to go between Earth and the Sun!
But even that is really, really close together compared to the other stars. It would take years to move from Earth to other stars at light speed! The distance you can cover while going at light speed for an entire year is called a light year. Here's the distances to the other stars in the poll, in light years:
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Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion: |
640 |
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Alpha Centauri: |
4.37 |
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Siruis, the Dog Star: |
8.6 |
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Polaris, the North Star: |
430 |
So the furthest star on the list is Betelgeuse, a red giant star, 640 light years from Earth. Betelgeuse forms Orion's right "armpit" (so on your left as you see him).
Even Betelgeuse is relatively close, though. One of the brightest stars in the sky, Deneb, is 1,600 light years away. The furthest star you can see with your naked eye is over 4,000 light years from Earth. And on a clear night, you can see all the way to the Andromeda Galaxy, 2,500,000 light years away! That's over 150 billion times as far as the Sun from Earth! |
More Coming Soon
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