Week 7

The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did.

With your group members, physically BUILD, using whatever you have access too, a scale model of the sun and the 4 inner planets. Include the moon (our moon). How big is the solar system? To answer this big question we built a model of the solar system. We included the sun, moon and 4 inner planets. We were told this to scale. So we had to figure out the appropriate size that our planets needed to be to be able to fit within our distance we had. We started out by making the planets pretty big but realized that the scale was to big and we did not have enough room to spread all of the planets out as they should have been. For example the earth was the size of a grape. But after we started over and made our planets a lot smaller we were able to fit everything. These were the size comparisons for the planets:

Sun: head of lettuce 

Moon: grain of salt 

Earth: mustard seed 

Venus: a little bit bigger than a mustard seed  

Mercury: mustard seed  

Mars: poppy seed 

The distance from the sun within 30 meters 

Mars: 29m

Earth: 19m

Moon: 5m away from Earth 

Venus: 14m 

Mercury: 7.5m

This lab made us realize how big the solar system really was because when we started we thought we would be able to fit bigger planets in the space we had but it wasn’t possible so we had to continue to make it smaller. 


A description of what you learned in Thursday's lecture. 

One of the biggest topics that we covered in lecture was the moon is constantly rotating. I knew that we only saw one side of the moon but I did not know that the moon rotates while going around the earth. It takes 28 days to go through a whole moon cycle and there is a sunrise on the moon every 14 days. We also learned how the moon was formed. It was formed from a mars-like sized object (Theia) colliding with the Earth. Pieces of the earth were broken off and the moon was formed. The moon is the size of the United States, very small. 


Answer questions about the weekly textbook reading:

What did you learn?

Throughout this chapter we learned all about the universe. We first learned about the big bang which was how the universe was created. Next we learned about the life cycle of stars. All stars begin as clouds of gas and dust which are called nebulae. The particles in a nebula start to attract, so their mass increases. This causes them to have more gravity which pulls in more particles. Eventually, there will be enough particles under intense heat and pressure in the center core and nuclear fusion can occur. The star then ignites and becomes a fully functioning star. Depending on the amount of material in the nebula, an average star or a super massive star is formed. We then go on to learn about the origins of the sun, earth, and moon. Earth was formed during the big bang. The moon was formed when a mars-sized object named theia collided with earth. This collision sent chunks of Earth into space which gravity bounded them together and they cooled down to create the moon. We only see one side of the moon. We learned about the galaxies. A galaxy is a collection of billions of stars, gas, and dust held together by gravity in space. There are three types of galaxies, the spiral galaxy which is what we live in, the elliptical galaxy, and the irregular galaxy. 

What was most helpful?

I found the time lines and pictures to be very helpful in this chapter. There was a lot of information to take in but it was a lot easier to understand with all of the pictures and timelines. 

What do you need more information on?

I feel like I still need more information about the moon phases and how to understand when the moon is in certain phases. 

What questions/concerns/comments do you have?

I am just concerned about the moon phases and not being able to identify when the moon is in certain phases. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 3

Image
The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. Our big question from this week's lab was, what affects a rider’s speed down a slide? With this question in our minds we made a list of variables that we could test to see what the effects are. Some of the effects we came up with are weight, outside force, clothing, material of slide, slope, length, etc. for our investigation we looked at how the weight affects how fast you will go down the slide. For our experiment we filled a film container with different materials to change the weight. We then slid the film container down a “slide” that was 2 meters long. Through our experiment we learned that weight does affect how fast you will go down the slide. Our film containers that weighed the most were filled full of water and sand and they went down the fastest.  A description of what you learned in Thursday's lecture.  During the lecture we learned that a rider’s speed on a slide is affected by the height o...
Read more

Week 14

  The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. Our big question this week in the lab was, how do greenhouse gases work? The greenhouse effect is when gases in the Earth’s atmosphere traps heat from the sun and this is what keeps the planet warm. Without the greenhouse effect, the Earth would be cold. This is the “cycle”: Sunlight comes in and warms the Earth’s surface  The earth gives off some of the heat as infrared radiation  Greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide) trap some of the heat and stop it from escaping into space  This is what keeps the planet warm.  We looked at lots of graphs that showed us how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere. One of the graphs I found very interesting was the one from West Branch, Iowa. The graph shows data points starting around 2008 and going up to 2022. We see in the graph that carbon dioxide levels get higher and higher every year and then they don’t go low. The data points go up and down in a s...
Read more

Week 5

Image
 In this week's lab we wrapped up our thoughts about swings from last week. We learned that pendulums collide with air particles, speeding them up and slowing down the pendulum. These collisions transfer energy from the pendulum to the air. This week our big question was, how can we design a safe and durable playground surface? To test this question we developed surfaces made out of different materials and dropped an egg on these surfaces to see if it would crack. If the egg cracked we knew that the surface was too hard for children to be playing on.  Test 1:  For our first test we place sand, saran wrap, hay, and then rubber in a bowl we tested to see if their mixture of material would make a good surface first by using a tennis ball. We held the tennis ball up 1 meter over the bowl and dropped it. We thought that this mixture would be good, so we moved onto dropping the eggs. The egg did not crack when it fell into the bowl but the egg did bounce out and cracked on the ...
Read more