Way Out There! Cool Space Facts

Guess what? The Moon is drifting away from us as fast as your fingernails grow. Zoom past the planets on a pick-your-path trip full of cool space facts. For kids 3–7+, free to preview.

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Illustration from Way Out There! Cool Space Facts for Kids

Let's point our super telescope at the night sky. Hello, Moon! Here's something you might not know. The Moon is slowly drifting away from Earth, about as fast as your fingernails grow. Every year, it moves one big strawberry's length farther away!

Now let's find Mars, the red planet, and look at its sky. In the daytime it's a dusty pinky-orange. But at sunset? Mars has BLUE sunsets! It's the exact opposite of ours. A robot rover on Mars even snapped a photo of one.

Farther out is huge, striped Jupiter, with its moon Europa. It's wrapped in a cracked white shell of ice. But scientists think Europa hides an ocean underneath, with more water than all of Earth's oceans put together! A secret sea, sloshing under the ice.

Things get stranger from here! A moon covered in volcanoes, or a look out past ALL the planets?

Cool space facts for kids

Way Out There! is an interactive story that takes kids aged 3 to 8 on a trip across space with a super telescope. We look farther and farther out, past the planets and their moons to giant stars and the black hole at the middle of our galaxy, with every page written to be read aloud together. Here are some of our favorite cool space facts.

Saturn has a storm at its north pole with six straight sides, like the end of a pencil, and nobody knows for sure why.
Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft ever sent, carries a golden disc of sounds from home, like laughter and a dog barking.
A planet called Kepler-16b circles two suns, so it gets two sunsets.
One deep-blue faraway planet has no ocean at all. Scientists think its blue comes from glass in its clouds, and the glass may rain sideways.
The clouds on Uranus hold the same gas that makes rotten eggs smell.
Scientists think it rains diamonds deep inside Uranus and Neptune.
Neptune's moon Triton is one of the coldest places ever measured, yet it has geysers shooting dark dust miles high.
Pluto's giant heart is mostly frozen nitrogen, the same gas that makes up most of the air you breathe.
The giant red star Betelgeuse puffed out a cloud of dust so big that people on Earth saw it go dim.
A neutron star is only about as wide as a city, but one spoonful of it would be as heavy as a mountain.
When Jocelyn Bell found the first pulsar in 1967, its flashes were so regular that her team joked it was aliens and nicknamed it Little Green Men.
A black hole isn't really a hole. Its pull is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light.

What's inside the story

The journey starts with the Moon, Mars and Jupiter, then heads either to the moons of the giant planets or out past all the planets. From there it opens into four paths, each exploring one corner of space: the icy far planets, tiny Pluto and its neighbors, strange giant stars, or the black hole at the middle of the Milky Way.

The story has 28 pages, four paths and four different endings, and every ending leaves kids with something to think about, try or look for in their own sky. Every fact is checked, and the whole story is narrated for read-aloud time together.

The most interesting space facts

What are the most interesting space facts?

Some of the most interesting space facts are about time: on Mercury, one sunrise to the next takes two whole Mercury years. And Pluto hasn't finished a single trip around the Sun since it was discovered in 1930.

What are some fun space facts for kids?

On Saturn's moon Titan, the air is so thick and gravity so weak that scientists say you could strap on wings and fly. Far past Pluto there's even a space rock shaped like a squashed red snowman, made of two lumps that bumped together gently and stuck.