Picnic Planet: A Lunchtime Guide to Your Galaxy's Exoplanets

by Asa Stahl, Nadia Hsieh (Illustrator)

Overview

Join an astrophysicist on a trip around the galaxy to explore worlds beyond our own.

If you could go anywhere beyond our galaxy for the perfect picnic, where would you go? Asa Stahl, an NSTA award-winner for his previous book The Big Bang Book, introduces readers to some of the fascinating exoplanets we know about it. This is science at its most fantastical. What other worlds are out there, and will the young person reading this book grow up to discover even more?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781954354234
Publisher:	Creston Books
Publication date:	09/05/2023
Pages:	32
Product dimensions:	9.25(w) x 11.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	7 - 8 Years

About the Author

Asa Stahl is an astrophysicist who loves to make science interesting for the youngest readers. His book, The Big Bang Book, won an NSTA/CBC Outstanding Science Trade Book recognition, among other awards. He creates astronomy curricula for The Planetary Society.

Nadia Hsieh uses art to tell stories. Her previous book, Eighteen Vats of Water, told a traditional slice of Chinese history. In Picnic Planet, she literally takes us out of this world.

Editorial Reviews

"[W]onderfully clever . . . . Perfect for fans of space, adventures, and daring picnics."—starred, Booklist

From the Publisher

2023-06-21
An astrophysicist tries to help out a pair of space-traveling picnickers searching for just the right spot.

The space-suited duo—one brown-skinned, the other presenting Asian in Hsieh’s cartoon illustrations—try Mars first but turn out to be picky sorts who demand a place with grass, trees, and a babbling brook. There’s nothing for it, then, but to bid the planets of our solar system goodbye one by one (“Back in a jiff, Jupiter!”) and try out Stahl’s much more far-flung suggestions…all of which, he explains in an expansive afterword, are real places. Proxima Centauri b? “Um. Beautiful, in its own rugged way.” But not much atmosphere. Gigantic HR 8799 e? Plenty of atmosphere, but any core surface is probably a “super-hot mess.” Other possibilities turn out to have issues, too, like being so close to its star that you age a year in just four hours or lacking a star altogether. Stahl’s final idea may not have a woodsy setting, but readers might find it more feasible: Why not spread a blanket up on a roof? “Then all you need are stars,” he notes, as readers get a final view of the young voyagers sitting on a rooftop, admiring a sparkling nighttime vista overhead. The source list at the end is all technical reports, and if the depictions of exoplanets and attendant stars are speculative, all are based on current information. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Too far to go in a spaceship but just right for a flight of imagination. (Informational picture book. 6-9)

Kirkus Reviews