By Dominic Walliman
A cat in a spacesuit walks your child through the whole universe, and the science underneath the silliness is written by a real physicist.
Professor Astro Cat takes your child out in order: the sun, each planet, moons and asteroids, then out past the solar system to stars, galaxies, black holes and the Big Bang, with a stop for how rockets work and what living on a space station is like. Every spread is flat bright shapes and a cat with an enormous helmet, and every spread is doing real physics.
This is the book for the stage where a child has outgrown planet facts and started asking what's outside the solar system. It goes to galaxies and the Big Bang and doesn't soften them, but Dominic Walliman is a physicist who plainly enjoys explaining, so the hard ideas arrive in one clean sentence instead of three careful ones. The cat is the trick that lets a seven-year-old carry a book about cosmology around without feeling like they've been given homework. It's also the best-looking book on this shelf, and that matters, because it's the one a child leaves open on the floor.