Chugley's Chatter

This monkey appreciates these articles for children, they are so easy to comprehend. I also find that contemplating the universe gives me a sense of proportion, and an appreciation of the majesty of God. Subscribe to Creation Magazine and keep informed about such things: https://creation.com/magazines Gibber! Gibber! Chugley Creation for Kids—The Sun: “The light that rules the day” by Lita Sanders and Jonathan Sarfati Published in Creation 43(1):32–35, 2021 The sun literally lights up the day! This star provides us with light as well as heat. It also powers green plants, allowing them to make their own food. Animals and people can eat plants for food. Without the sun there would be no light, heat, or food. The sun is huge! The sun may not look big, but it really is! How do we know? Because it’s so far away, it must be huge to look the way it does. About 250 years before Christ, Aristarchus proved that the sun must be many times further away than the moon. So why do they seem to be the same size? Because the sun must be far bigger than the moon. In fact, far bigger than the earth! Modern astronomers now know that the sun is about 150 million km (93 million miles) away. This distance is also called the astronomical unit (AU). The sun is over 100 times wider than the earth. It is 1,392,000 km (864,950 miles) across. It is so huge that 1.3 million Earths could fit inside it. Our special star The sun is remarkable even by the standards of stars. The sun is bigger than most stars, but that’s not what makes it the most important. It is also very stable and has been for thousands of years. Every few years, the sun sends out a major flare that can interfere with city power grids. However, living creatures are…

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The best antidote this monkey knows, for combating the lunacy of this fallen world, is to meditate on the work of the Almighty Creator who is in charge, and promises Eternal Life for those who accept His Son as Lord. Don’t forget to subscribe to Creation magazine and receive regular top ups for your faith. Subscribe here: https://creation.com/magazines Gibber! Gibber! Chugley The Solar System Creation for Kids by Lita Sanders and Jonathan Sarfati Published in Creation 42(4):32–35, 2020 For thousands of years, people have been fascinated by what they called ‘wandering stars’. These moved slowly but noticeably against the background of the other stars. Today, we call these ‘planets’, from the Greek for ‘wandering’. Together with the sun and many smaller bodies, such as comets, they and their moons are part of the solar system (Latin sol = sun). Studying the movements of the planets helped to develop modern science. Puzzling motions Ancient astronomers believed that everything in the heavens revolved around the earth (called geocentrism, from Greek gē = earth). But planets occasionally seemed to go backwards briefly (retrograde motion), before going on their forward path again. How come? The Greek astronomer Ptolemy, who lived about 100 years after Christ, had a complex answer. In his book called the Almagest, he proposed that planets moved in epicycles—circles upon circles. See Diagram 1 for why they would appear to reverse course briefly. This was the main astronomy textbook for well over a thousand years. Eventually, astronomers realized that this explanation wasn’t correct. A few astronomers proposed a novel idea: the earth and planets all revolved around the sun. This is called heliocentrism (from Greek hēlios = sun). In this system, planets occasionally pass each other. This explains the apparent backward motions (see Diagram 2). Some very high-ranking churchmen in the late Middle Ages (14th and…

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