This is what we are doing
Happy Thursday May 18 to alll
This week, the students did a Cosmic Survey.
They were given seven color pictures of :
Hubble telescope, sun, moon, Saturn, Whirlpool Galaxy, Pleaides
star cluster, and Hubble Deep Space galaxies. In groups they
discussed how big, how old and how far from Earth each one was.
Do you know, the Pleaides star cluster is very young, only 80 million
years old; if the first dinosaurs looked at the sky, they would not
have seen it!!
The Como Planetarium field trip was lots of fun! The students
had a great time on the bus, singing and being crazy, and the lesson on
constellations and planet movements was very important. I think
we all learned a lot.
Today, in all my 5 classes, students made a Hertsprung -Russell
diagram, plotting the stars' brightness to its temperature. About
90% of the stars fall in a 'main sequence', a gently sloping
line. The rest are either giants, supergiants or black (cooler)
or white (extremely hot) dwarfs , but very small (size of Earth).
May 5
All students are learning about stars and galaxies. Do you
know how long light from the sun has to travel, before it reaches the
Earth? Traveling at (the speed of light) 300,000 km/sec, it takes 8.2
minutes. So if the sun were to blow up now, we would see it 8.2 minutes
later! What a huge concept. I love science!!
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