Let's Learn English! Topic: Space! 🚀👩‍🚀🛰️ (Lesson Only)

Well, hello, and welcome to

this English lesson about space.

We live on the planet Earth, but when you

look up at the night sky, you just see

a great expanse of blackness with some stars.

And sometimes you can see a planet.

It kind of just looks like a bright star.

And of course, you can see the moon most nights.

During the day, all you can really see is

the sun because the blue sky kind of blocks

our view of the rest of space.

But space is fascinating.

I personally love stories about space.

I like science fiction novels

and science fiction tv shows.

I like shows that take place in space.

So I thought it would be fun to do

a lesson about all of the words and phrases

that we use in English to talk about space.

So, once again, welcome to

this English lesson about space. Space.

So I kind of explained what

space is in my introduction.

There's the world we live in.

We walk on the Earth every day.

It's kind of gravity that keeps us here, but way

up in the sky, if you go further, far enough.

Sorry, if you go far enough,

you are eventually in space.

We sometimes call it outer space, and we simply

use this word to refer to everything that's not

the Earth or other planets or suns or stars.

So space is kind of that big area up

in past the sky where we sometimes send rockets.

But not all the time, not as often as I would like.

I would love it if we already had a

colony on Mars, if we already were exploring space.

I wish we had a colony on Mars and the moon.

I would go to both of them for a vacation, for sure.

But, yes, space.

All of that area way up there, the solar system.

Let me make this a bit bigger for you.

So the solar system contains the sun and

all of the planets that orbit the sun.

So I think it's Mercury,

Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.

Is it Neptune and then Uranus? I'm not sure.

But anyways, our solar system

consists of a central star.

And around that star, we have planets that orbit

Earth is the third planet from the sun.

And so in our solar system, we have a

number of planets, of which Earth is one.

And I think it contains the moon

as well, but definitely a solar system.

The planets are in orbit because of

the sun's gravitational pull, because of gravity.

Remember, this isn't a science lesson, though.

If I get some things wrong, please excuse me.

You should always look things up yourself as well

if it sounds like sketchy science to you.

An astronomer is a person who observes space

and stars and the sun and moon.

An astronomer is someone who looks up into the

sky maybe they study the rotation of planets.

Maybe they study the orbits of planets or comets.

But an astronomer is definitely someone who regularly looks up

into the night sky and studies the night sky.

I admire astronomers because they can stay up

late and not be tired the next day.

It must be hard to be an astronomer because you

spend most of your time looking at the night sky

at night, so you're not sleeping at that time.

The field that an astronomer

works in is called astronomy.

So astronomy, then, is the act of

looking at the night sky regularly.

You can be an amateur

astronomer or a professional astronomer.

You might own a small telescope and go out

into your backyard at night, and you are an

amateur astronomer, but you still are studying.

You are doing astronomy, or you might get paid for it.

Maybe you work for a large university and

you are paid to study the night sky.

That would be a really cool job.

And, of course, you would need a telescope.

There are many different kinds of telescopes.

As a kid, I had a really cheap telescope.

It was good for maybe looking at the moon.

It wasn't good for looking at much else than that.

But a telescope is a tube with lenses

in it, and because of the arrangement of

the lenses, it allows you to see further.

Binoculars work on the same principle.

That's my little binocular example.

But, yeah, a telescope has an eyepiece, and

you basically use the telescope to look at

things that are very, very far away.

So, of course, things like the moon or stars or

other things in the universe, in the galaxy that we

live in are fun to look at with a telescope.

I'm trying to use words that I'm going to talk about,

as well as the words that I am talking about.

An observatory.

So an observatory is a special place that's built.

One moment here, I just have to pull up something.

An observatory is a special building

built to house a telescope.

So when we have a building that has something

in it, you can use the word house.

So notice it's pronounced different than house, though.

So it's used to house a telescope.

And then the doors can open at night, and it

can rotate, and the telescope can point in different directions.

I think a lot of telescopes are located in very

dark places or also very close to the equator.

Don't quote me on that again.

Sometimes I say things and they might not

be true, but when I watch movies, often

telescopes are located near the equator.

Maybe I'm wrong about that.

You guys should look that one up.

But anyways, an observatory is something that has a

gigantic telescope in it, and people can use that

telescope to look at things in the night sky.

And, of course, if we send people

into space, we call them astronauts.

So an astronaut is a person who has gone up in

a rocket or a shuttle and has made it to the

edge of the earth's atmosphere, and they are in space, okay?

So when they are in space, they

need to wear a special suit.

They need to wear a spacesuit. What a great name.

A spacesuit helps protect them, because when

you are in space, there's no air.

There's literally nothing.

Well, almost nothing.

There's always a little bit of cosmic dust

or something in space, but there's basically nothing.

Space is a vacuum.

There's no air, there's no oxygen.

So you need to wear a protective suit to

protect your body and to help you breathe.

So astronauts regularly go up to

things like the space station.

They need to wear their spacesuit

when they are up there.

And so I mentioned rocket and shuttle.

So a rocket is, of course, a vehicle

that you use to get to space.

A rocket sits on a launch

pad, and there's usually a Countdown.

Ten, 987-654-3210 blast off.

That's what I used to say as a kid.

The engines.

The rocket engines will ignite, and they have enough

thrust to make it so the rocket can travel

up out of the Earth's atmosphere into space.

Very, very cool.

A space shuttle is very similar, except that a

space shuttle usually looks more like an airplane, at

least one part of it, because it can return

and land after it has gone to space.

But, of course, now SpaceX has rockets that can land.

It took them a while to figure that out, but

they have rockets that can land after going to space.

So rockets have become reusable as well.

So space shuttle and rocket.

A black hole.

So my understanding is that a black hole is

something in space where it has so much gravity

that it pulls everything around it in, including light.

So a little bit hard to understand, but you

might hear about this if you read a science

fiction novel or watch a science fiction tv show.

When a spaceship gets close to a

black hole, it gets sucked in.

That's the term.

The black hole is pulling us in, captain.

You'll hear them say that, or put the engines on full,

because the gravity of the black hole is pulling us in.

So you don't have to fully understand what a black

hole is, except that it's dangerous if you're in space

and you are in a spaceship, the sun.

So the sun, as most of you know, is actually a star.

It just happens to be our star.

And so the sun is a giant ball of fusion.

I think it is generating heat and light.

If it wasn't for the sun, there

would be no life on Earth.

We rely heavily on the sun to keep our

planet warm and for our day night cycle.

So in order for us to have daytime and

nighttime as the Earth turns, we are either facing

the sun or facing away from the sun.

And so this is what helps our crops grow.

This is what helps us get vitamin D.

So when I go outside and I go for a walk,

sunlight on my skin helps me to get vitamin D.

It's just basically even the oil we get out

of the ground is in some way stored sunlight.

Did you know that?

And then we have the moon, and we have stars.

The moon is, of course, our friend in the sky at night.

That's what I remember from a children's book that

I read when I was really, really young.

And the moon doesn't really have an atmosphere.

And so when astronauts go to the

moon, they have to wear a spacesuit.

And also the moon has a number of craters on it.

I'll talk about craters in a little bit because

it regularly gets hit by things that leave craters.

By the way, the moon also has phases.

So you can have a full moon, you can

have a half moon, you can have a new

moon, which is when there's no moon at all.

But definitely the moon has phases.

Let me find the official phases of the moon.

The new moon, the first quarter moon, the full

moon, the waxing moon, the third quarter moon.

I think you understand what all those mean.

I really like it when there's a full moon because

you can see when you go outside at night.

And then, of course, we have what are called stars.

When you look in the night sky, you see lots of stars.

This is what I think makes

the night sky the most enjoyable.

I really like looking up at the stars.

In fact, when the moon has fully disappeared, it's

really nice because you have a good view of

all of the stars in the sky.

And we also have what's called constellations.

A constellation is a group of stars

that we think looks like something.

That's the best way to describe it.

Not quite sure if you can see it, but in

the northern hemisphere, we have something called the Big Dipper.

In this picture, the Big Dipper,

see if you can find it.

It's kind of sideways.

It's near this side of the picture.

And it has 123-4567 really bright stars.

And it looks like a ladle that you would

use for soup or maybe to drink water.

Maybe you would dip some water out.

And the cool thing about the Big Dipper in the

northern hemisphere is the two stars at the far end

of the cup part of the Big Dipper.

They line up and they point to the north star,

which is on the far side of this picture.

I should have put some arrows, shouldn't I?

Sorry, I should have done that.

But anyways, constellations.

There's things like Virgo and Orion.

There's different constellations that we see in the northern

hemisphere, and you see different ones in the southern

hemisphere if you are down below us.

But basically a group of stars

that humans think look like something.

When a planet goes around the

sun, it's called an orbit.

When the moon goes around the

Earth, that is the moon's orbit.

So an orbit refers to the path that something

in space follows as it goes around something else.

It takes the Earth 365 days to go around the sun.

Actually, I think it's leap year this year.

Is it leap year this year?

Might get an extra day this year.

Someone should check that.

But, yes, orbit is what determines

the length of our year.

So we orbit around the sun.

Just checking.

Sometimes during the lesson, I get curious.

So there's 365.26 days in the Earth's orbit, and that's

why we need to have leap year every four years.

And then I was going to check, is it leap year 2024?

2024 is a leap year. So there you go.

I have to teach an extra day, then that's okay.

And then I mentioned this before.

There are planets.

So a planet is definitely not a star.

It's not like our sun, and it's not a moon.

A planet will definitely orbit a star.

Our planets orbit the sun.

And then again, oh, I think I got the order wrong.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter,

Saturn, Uranus, and then Neptune.

I think I said it the other way for the last two.

Generally, I think a planet has to have an atmosphere

of some kind in order to be considered a planet.

Again, not a science lesson.

But planets are large spheres.

So a sphere is a big like a ball

in space, and we live on the planet Earth.

An asteroid is not a planet.

It's much smaller than a planet.

It's usually just a bunch of rock or ice or metal.

It does orbit the sun.

So we do have an asteroid belt in our solar system.

I think it's out by Saturn or something

like that, or somewhere out that way.

I don't actually know if it's that way.

I don't know where it is.

But it is just a whole

bunch of, basically rocks, space rocks.

So asteroids, though, can have frozen water or even other

gases that are frozen or just rock or metal.

All of the things that we have on

Earth can be also found in asteroids, so

they can be very rich in different materials.

A meteor or a meteorite and a falling star is the same.

Is that the next slide? Shooting star.

Falling star.

So a meteor is a piece of debris, something that

falls from space to Earth that's not man made.

So if a big chunk of rock comes into

our atmosphere and falls to the Earth, we would

call it a meteor or a meteorite. It's the same thing.

I think a meteorite might be a little smaller.

I don't really know.

But when you see a falling star,

it's actually a meteor or a meteorite.

They are the same thing.

So a shooting star or a

falling star isn't actually a star.

That would be bad.

If a gigantic star hit our planet, that would be bad.

But definitely sometimes at night, you can see

meteors fall, and you can find meteors.

There was actually a news story of a man who

recently found a meteor, I think, on the roof of

his house, and it was very, very valuable.

And, yes, sometimes we actually have meteor showers.

And if you go out at night, you will

see a lot of meteors falling from the sky. A comet.

So a comet is a little hard for me to describe.

It's a giant ball of rock and ice that orbits the

sun, and as it orbits, it leaves a trail behind it.

It kind of reflects the sun's light, and I'm

not sure if it has its own light.

But the most famous comet is Haley's comet.

So if I put famous comet, Haley's comet is

the most famous visible every 75 to 79 years.

And then I'm going to get the official.

So, comets are large objects made of

dust and ice that orbit the sun,

best known for their long, streaming tails.

So dust and ice. There you go.

Very cool.

I don't remember if I've ever seen a comet.

I don't think I have an eclipse.

There's two kinds of eclipses.

There's a solar eclipse and a lunar eclipse.

There's actually an eclipse coming up

in North America in April.

There's going to be a full solar eclipse.

I think it's happening after the school day, but

I think we're having a longer school day on

the day of the eclipse because the path of

the eclipse goes right across the United States and

then right into our part of Canada.

So we're going to get all of the special glasses,

and we're going to stay late because I think the

eclipse happens around 04:00 and I'm not sure the exact

date, but an eclipse is when the moon goes between

the earth and the sun or when the earth goes

between the moon and the sun.

So a solar eclipse is when the

moon crosses in front of the sun.

Here, we'll do an eclipse right here.

My face is the sun, and then this is a solar eclipse.

Right. And then don't look.

You need special glasses.

Otherwise you can damage your eyes.

The Milky Way.

So the Milky Way is a galaxy, and the

Milky Way is the galaxy that we live in.

And it's so big that you can see it like we're

in it, but you can still see it sometimes at night.

You do need to be somewhere very dark in order

to see the Milky Way, but you can kind of

see parts of the galaxy that we live in.

Not sure why they called it the Milky Way.

Probably because it looks kind of white.

But then, as I said, the Milky Way is a galaxy, and

the galaxy that we live in, the Milky Way is a galaxy,

and the galaxy that we live in is the Milky Way.

There you go.

There's a sentence that makes sense,

but sounds kind of silly.

A galaxy is a collection of all different

things in space held together by gravity.

So there is a spin to a galaxy, and there

is some gravity, and it has stars and planets.

And everything that you can imagine

existing is in a galaxy.

Really fun, though.

Sometimes at night, you can see it a little bit here, but

it has to be really dark and a really clear night.

And then, of course, that is what

the universe is made up of.

So every shiny part of this picture is a galaxy.

So our galaxy is enormous, but

the universe is even bigger.

The universe is basically everything

that exists is the universe.

So we live in a very, very big universe.

If you can think that just looking in one direction,

there are that many galaxies, it's a little bit crazy

to think, well, how many galaxies are there?

How many galaxies in the 2 trillion galaxies?

Okay, that's just a little crazy.

It's estimated that there are between 200 billion

to 2 trillion galaxy in the observable universe.

Yeah, that's a lot.

Satellite.

So humans decided that if things can orbit planets, why

don't we make things and stick them in orbit?

And one of the things we make is called a satellite.

Satellites are generally used for communication.

So a satellite is a man made object that we

launch into space on a rocket, and then it circles

the earth, or it stays in exactly the same spot.

There's something called geosynchronous orbit,

which is pretty wild.

What that means is that as the earth

turns, the satellite stays in the same spot.

That's pretty cool, because then you know

that at a certain spot in the

sky, the satellite will always be there.

Generally.

Initially, satellites were used for communication.

They are now also used for things like GPS.

Like the gps in your phone connects to three

satellites and then you know where you are.

They're also used to take photographs

when you use Google maps.

Now, the images are from satellites, but satellites

basically are man made things put into space.

I think it can be non man made as well.

I think a piece of rock could be a satellite.

But generally when you say satellite, we're talking about

something like that that we put into space.

We also put things in space, like space stations.

There's an international space station where

different astronauts from different countries can

go and do scientific experiments.

They can observe the earth, they can

see how plants grow in zero gravity.

But it is. I don't know.

I always feel claustrophobic when I see

images of people in the space station.

When you're claustrophobic, you don't like being in

a space where there's not very much room.

Let's see here.

A crater.

When an object from space hits the moon

or hits Earth, it often leaves a crater.

And on Earth, there are

large craters in different countries.

And what it's caused is when a gigantic meteor hits

the Earth with so much force that it makes all

of the dirt and rock kind of move out of

its way because of the force of the impact.

So I think there's a large crater in Canada somewhere.

There's definitely craters in almost every

country, but I'm wondering if northern

countries get hit a bit more.

I'm not sure.

Again, not a science lesson.

The atmosphere.

The earth is surrounded by the atmosphere.

This is the air we breathe.

When I go outside, I breathe in, and I breathe

out mostly nitrogen and oxygen and a few other gases.

The oxygen is the important one.

I think the air outside is 20% oxygen

or something like that, somewhere in that range.

And this is what we need to survive and to live.

The higher you go up, though,

the thinner the atmosphere is.

So if you climb a mountain, it's harder to breathe

at the top than it is at the bottom.

I guess there is less air, but the

air is more condensed at the surface.

And as you go up the mountain, the

air is less, there's just less air.

The air is thinner we'll say it that way.

But the atmosphere is the layer of air around the

earth that has clouds and air and all of the

things in it that we need a light year.

So a light year is the distance

that light travels in one year.

So the sun, as we said, is eight

minutes and 20 seconds from the Earth.

So it's nowhere near a light year away.

But if you go far enough out into space where

you're at, the part where it would take light one

year to get there from the sun, you would be

one light year away from the sun.

It's one of the things that lets

us know just how big space is.

The fact that we have to measure

it using something called light years.

The distance that light can travel in one

year is used as a measurement nebula.

I don't really know what a nebula is, but I

do know that it is a visible thing in the

sky with a telescope, where it's just a whole lot

of cosmic dust and other things in space.

So I think one of the most

popular nebulas is the horsehead nebula.

We're going to look up meaning of nebula, even

though I did last night, a cloud of gas

and dust in space visible in the night sky,

usually with a telescope as a bright patch or

as a dark silhouette against other luminous matter.

Luminous meaning things that emit light.

So here's the simple thing.

It's a cool thing in the sky to look at.

That's what I would say a nebula is.

Now we're going to go into the world

of science fiction for a little bit.

UFO stands for unidentified flying objects. Object.

I don't personally believe in aliens or ufos.

I've never seen a UFO or an alien.

Some people think there are spaceships that

come from other planets, and they fly

around at night in our night sky.

And that on those spaceships, you

would find an alien or aliens.

So I personally don't think that they exist.

I think we would have seen them by now.

But who knows?

I've been wrong before.

But UFO stands for unidentified flying object.

And then an alien would be any creature

that's not from Earth and not human. Okay?

So that is what I would say

is science fiction at this point.

Not fact, but science fiction.