Science for Kids — August 2: Stars, seas, and ancient stones

Professor Pip adjusted his slightly crooked spectacles and patted the bulging pockets of his forest-green lab coat until he found what he wanted. Out came his small brass telescope, cool and heavy in his paw.

"Ah! Just what we need for a starry evening like this."

Mia and Leo were sitting cross-legged on the hilltop grass, their heads tipped back. Above them, the sky was crackling with stars.

"See that big orange one, on the shoulder of Orion?" said Pip, pointing his paw. "That is Betelgeuse. She is so enormous that if she sat where our Sun sits, she would swallow up all the planets out to Jupiter."

"Whoaaa," said Leo. His tail (imaginary) swished.

"For a hundred years," Pip whispered, "everybody thought Betelgeuse was alone up there. But some astronomers said, 'Wait — what if she has a friend hiding right next to her, and we just cannot see it because she is too bright?'"

Mia frowned. "How could you not see it? A star is a STAR."

"Let me show you." Pip fished a small lantern out of another pocket and clicked it on. Then he pulled out a firefly in a jar. He held them right next to each other and lifted them up. "Look. Where is the firefly?"

The children squinted. "I can't see it!" said Leo. "The lantern is too bright!"

"Precisely!" Pip's tail swished happily. "Right next to something dazzling, a tiny light seems to disappear. That is called glare. To spot the little friend, we have to block out the big bright thing." Pip lifted a paw-sized card and slid it in front of the lantern. Suddenly — PLINK! — the firefly's tiny glow was easy to see, floating there in the dark.

"That is exactly what the astronomers did," Pip said. "They pointed a giant telescope called the VLT — the Very Large Telescope, high in the mountains of Chile — right at Betelgeuse. Then they used a clever tool to block Betelgeuse's blinding light. And there, right where they had hoped, was a small star swirling around her. They named it Betelgeuse B. It has been there the whole time, tugging on her by gravity like a friend holding hands and spinning."

"Like the moon around the Earth!" Mia gasped.

"Exactly right, Mia," said Pip, beaming.

They lay back and watched Betelgeuse quietly for a while. Somewhere up there, Pip thought, two enormous suns were spinning gently around one another — and had been all along.

"Now I wonder," Pip said softly, "how many other lonely-looking stars have friends we simply have not seen yet…"

Down at the riverbank, Professor Pip had built a very peculiar tower. It was a tall, teetering stack of pancakes.

Asha and Theo stared. "Um, Professor," Asha said politely, "why are you stacking your breakfast?"

"Ah!" said Pip. His tail swished mischievously. "This is not breakfast. This is the ocean."

He pointed a paw at the top pancake. "You are up here, at the surface, splashing about in the sunshine. There is only one pancake pressing down on your head — barely anything at all. Very comfortable."

Then he pointed a paw at the very bottom pancake. "But down here…" He gave the top of the stack a gentle push. All the pancakes squished down. The bottom one squashed almost flat.

"Ohhhh," said Theo. "Every pancake above is pushing down!"

"Precisely!" Pip clapped his little paws. "In the ocean, every drop of water above is pressing down on the water below. The deeper you go, the harder the squeeze. This is called pressure."

He pulled his pocket notebook out and flipped to a fresh page. "Now — scientists from a place called Woods Hole recently sent a robot submarine into a trench in the Pacific Ocean called the Atacama Trench. It went nearly eight thousand meters down. Do you know how much pressure that is?"

Pip tapped the pancake stack. "Seven hundred and ninety times heavier than the air you are breathing right now. If you tried to go down there in your body, it would… well, let's just say your ears would not enjoy it."

Asha wrinkled her nose. "So nothing lives there, right?"

"Oh my whiskers, Asha — that is the surprise!" Pip pulled a jar from his coat and held it up. Inside, floating serenely, was a tiny model of a shrimp-like creature about as long as a strawberry. "The scientists found this. It is a brand-new animal — nobody has ever seen one before. Its name is Dulcibella camanchaca."

Theo giggled. "Dool-chi-BELLA?"

"A pretty name for a fierce little hunter!" said Pip. "Most tiny creatures that deep just nibble on things falling from above. But this one — this one has big grabber-arms and mouth-parts made for tearing. It hunts, my friends. Down where it is dark and cold and squeezed."

"How does it not get squished?" Asha whispered.

"Because it was built for that world," said Pip. "Its whole body — its shell, its guts, its little wiggly legs — is designed for pressure. To it, the deep ocean is not scary. It is home."

He handed each of them a little balloon. "Squeeze that gently. Now imagine being squeezed like that all the time — and thinking it feels perfectly normal. That is Dulcibella, out there in the dark, hunting away as we speak."

Professor Pip was very carefully NOT stepping on a rock.

Jun and Sofia leaned in closer, holding their breath. In front of them, poking up out of the sand along the lakeshore, was something that looked exactly like a long, curved, chalky bone.

Pip pulled his soft fossil brush from his coat pocket and began to whisk sand away in the tiniest, gentlest strokes. His magnifying glass hung around his neck. His tail was completely still, which was very unusual for Pip.

"Now," he whispered, "does anybody remember how a bone can turn into a rock?"

Sofia raised a finger. "Um. Time?"

"Excellent start," Pip whispered back. "Millions of years ago, an animal died right around here. Mud and sand slowly covered the bones. Then water dripped through, carrying tiny minerals — bits of rock so small you cannot see them. The minerals seeped into the bones and hardened, replacing them piece by piece. So the bone becomes a rock in the exact shape of the bone. That is fossilization."

"Rock-that-remembers," Jun whispered. His eyes were wide.

Pip beamed. "Curiouser and curiouser, Jun — I like that! Rock that remembers." He kept brushing, and slowly, slowly, more of the shape appeared. "This one came from a real place — Lake Kariba, in a country called Zimbabwe. A scientist named Paul was walking along the shore, and there it was, just… peeking out."

"An accident?" said Sofia.

"A very good accident. Sometimes the wind and rain do the digging for us. When his team took a proper look, they realized this creature had never been named before. So they called it Musango matusadonaensis."

Jun tried to say it and giggled halfway through.

Pip laughed too. "This one was little — about the size of a large pony. But her cousins, over millions of years, grew and grew and grew, until they became the giant long-necked dinosaurs — the ones as tall as houses."

"So she was a great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma of a giant?" said Sofia.

"Exactly right! And she lived when the very first dinosaurs were just spreading around the world. Places like Zimbabwe are FULL of fossils that nobody has looked for yet. Sometimes finding a new dinosaur just means being the first person to walk down the right shore." He looked up at Jun and Sofia and gently placed a tiny brush into each of their paws — er, hands.

"Now — very slowly. You go next."