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Children's Story - Curiosity

Scouting

In 1608 the telescope was invented; a telescope is what you use to see what’s far away. A great Italian artist and scientist named Galileo heard about this invention; wrote and asked how it was done, and made one of his own. He then turned it on the sky, and saw all sorts of stars that no one had ever seen before.

 

He was looking at one of the planets, Jupiter, and he thought that he saw four dim stars around it. The next night he looked again, and it looked like these stars had moved, which showed that they weren’t stars. As he looked night after night, it looked like they sometimes disappeared and then reappeared, but never moved far from Jupiter. What were they? Then Galileo realized: they were moons of Jupiter. The same way our moon circles the earth, Jupiter had its own moons which moved around that planet. The reason they seem to sometimes disappear is that sometimes they are behind Jupiter and then we can’t see them. It’s the first time anyone realized that other planets had moons just as we do.

 

Why did Galileo look at the sky? No one was paying him to watch stars. At the time, it was not a way to grow famous. When Galileo discovered these moons, only a few people in the whole world cared. He just wanted to know.

 

To understand anything we must first be curious and ask the question: why? The question we ask in church is: who made this place that you and I live in? Why are we here?

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