Week 7 Blog

The big question addressed in the lab was- What is scale, and how do we properly construct a solar system to scale? What we started with was the Sun, and deciding how big our Sun was going to be and being able to keep our solar system within the Lindquist Center, before moving on. Our group made our Sun 500 mm large, and the rest of the planets were very tiny compared to this! We only had to create four planets, and Mars was all the way to the end of Lindquist! We used Play-Doh to create our planets and a meter stick to ensure we were making them the correct length. This was very eye opening to see how tiny the planets are compared to the Sun, and how far away the planets are. I used to think the solar system was crowded, but definitely not anymore!

In the lecture, we discussed shadows and where our shadows would be if we were on the Tropic of Capricorn versus the Tropic of Cancer. Moon phases were also touched upon, but the main idea we discussed was the Moon and its origin. We talked about the theory where the Earth captured the Moon, which we decided does not make sense in the topic of physics. Fission was the next idea we brought up, which would be that molten spun off of Earth and became the Moon, which we also decided did not make sense. Co-formation is the idea that it came from gas and dust that was created along with the Earth. They can not be made of the same material because that would change the complete structure of the Moon. Colliding planetesimals is about a giant object hit into Earth, which would have created the tilt and the Moon. The big idea that remained with me is to allow our students to bring their cultures into our classroom when it comes to, for example, the Moon and how it was created.

In the textbook reading, I learned why Pluto is no longer a planet. I used to think that it was just because it was too small, which is true, but the reasoning behind the smallness of it is why it is no longer a planet. This is because it does not clear its orbit through other objects. That is the third requirement to become a planet, along with orbits the sun and its round shape. The most helpful was the pictures that show more of the size comparison between the planets. I just find this to be so interesting because I have never realized how small our planets truly are, and how they are even smaller compared to the sun. A piece of information that remained with me from the textbook was that the rocky planets are smaller while the gaseous planets are larger. I feel like I need more information on the details of the planets because I could not really describe much about the planets, but I do find them to be very interesting!