Chapter 1: The Sun's Great Family: The Solar System

A gentle note: “Pluto is the ninth planet”

Many of us were taught that there are nine planets, with Pluto as the ninth. That is why you may still hear it. In 2006, scientists studied Pluto carefully and decided it is better called a ‘dwarf planet’, because it is very small and shares its part of space with other icy bodies. So today we count eight planets. Pluto is still there, still interesting — it simply has a new and more fitting name.

Story Time — The Family Portrait

Meera · Kochi, Kerala

Meera, who had once kept a diary of the changing Moon, now had a new project at school: to build a model of the Solar System. She spent an evening rolling balls of clay of every size, from a tiny grain for Mercury to a great fat ball for Jupiter.

As she painted them, her grandfather watched with interest. “Why are you making so many balls?” he asked. “They are the planets, Appuppa,” Meera said. “Eight of them. They all travel around the Sun, each on its own path. Together they are called the Solar System — the Sun's family.”

“And where are we?” he asked, smiling. Meera held up the third ball from the Sun, a small blue-and-green one. “This is us. This is the Earth.” Her grandfather looked at the little clay ball for a long moment. “So everything we have ever known — our home, our country, the whole sea outside — is on that one small ball?”

“Yes,” said Meera. “And the Sun is so much bigger than all of them. If the Sun were the size of a football, the Earth would be smaller than a peppercorn.” Her grandfather shook his head in wonder. “We are a very small part of a very large family.”

When Meera carried her finished model to school, her teacher hung it from the ceiling, with the Sun in the middle and the eight planets circling around. The whole class gathered beneath it, looking up, and for a moment they were not in a classroom in Kochi at all — they were standing in space, looking at the Sun's great family.

Story Time — The Planet with a Thousand Rings

Ishaan · Nagpur, Maharashtra

At a science fair in Nagpur, Ishaan waited in a long line for one thing only: a turn at the big telescope. A scientist had set it up and pointed it carefully at a bright dot in the evening sky. “What are we looking at?” Ishaan asked when his turn came.

“Look and see,” the scientist said. Ishaan closed one eye and peered in — and gasped. There, small but perfectly clear, was a golden ball with a bright ring around it. “It has a ring! A real ring!” “That is Saturn,” the scientist said. “The rings are made of countless pieces of ice and rock, all circling the planet.”

“Can I really be seeing it myself? Not a photo?” Ishaan asked. “The light in your eye right now,” the scientist said, “left Saturn more than an hour ago and travelled across space to reach you. You are seeing the real Saturn.”

Ishaan stepped back so others could look, but he could not stop smiling. He had seen, with his own eyes, a planet so far away that its light took an hour to arrive. “There are eight planets,” the scientist added. “Each one is different. Saturn has rings, Jupiter is a giant, Mars is red. Our Solar System is full of wonders.”

That night Ishaan wrote in his notebook: “Today I looked past the sky and saw another world.” He decided he would look through that telescope as often as he could, for there were seven more planets waiting.