Astronomy (Period 7/8)
Course Description
Astronomy is the branch of science that deals with celestial objects, space, and the physical universe as a whole.
Astronomy is the study of the universe, namely the objects we observe, like the Moon, Sun, and planets in our Solar System; stars; our Milky Way Galaxy, and other galaxies; and, a host of other celestial objects and phenomena, like nebulae, and black holes.
Astronomy is a multidisciplinary science. It is intertwined with the study of physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, geology and biology.
Unlike most other fields of science, astronomers are unable to observe a system entirely from birth to death; the lifetime of worlds, stars, and galaxies span millions to billions of years. Instead, astronomers must rely on snapshots of bodies in various stages of evolution to determine how they formed, evolved and died. Thus, theoretical and observational astronomy tend to blend together, as theoretical scientists use the information actually collected to create simulations, while the observations serve to confirm the models — or to indicate the need for tweaking them.
Astronomy is broken down into a number of sub fields, allowing scientists to specialize in particular objects and phenomena.
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Meteor Crater
Why is our universe fine-tuned for life?
If you need additional ideas about your solar system scale this will help you
Planet Cards
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| Cut out the planet printouts provided, or using the measurements in the table above, use your compass to draw circles on paper. Note that this activity uses two scales: one for the printouts and cut-outs (larger), and one for the distances between the planets (smaller). This is due to the enormous distances involved. The planet cut-outs would be too small to use in our scale model. |
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| If you choose to draw your own circles, label each planet. Cut the circles out and use them as your planets. |
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| Choose a point at one end of a hallway, large room, or outdoor space as the Sun and mark it as your starting point. |
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| Without looking at the table, place each planet in order of the distance you think they are from the Sun. As a reference, use 22.4 inches (57 centimeters) for the distance between Earth and the Sun. |
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| Using the table, measure the distances by rolling out the toilet paper. Mercury is 1.9 sheets relative to the Sun, Venus 3.6 sheets from the Sun, etc. See how well your family did at estimating the distances. Move the planets to their proper distances, and you've built a scale model of the solar system. | |
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What has NASA's Juno discovered around Jupiter so far?
What did NASA's New Horizons discover around Pluto?
Light travels fast. In one second it races around the Earth seven times. Then in a blink of an eye, light reaches the Moon.
Going out to the stars, Astronomers know that by studying Cepheid variables, the fluctuation in brightness of certain stars, we can calculate the star's distance from Earth. The longer the period of fluctuation, the brighter the star. So even though a star might appear extremely dim, if it had a long period it must actually be extremely large. The star appeared dim only because it was extremely far away. By calculating how bright it appeared from Earth and comparing this to its intrinsic brightness, Astronomers could estimate how much of the star's light had been lost while reaching Earth, and how far away the star actually was.