ASTR 101
Size of the Solar System
Name _______ Section __ Overview
· Become familiar with the scale of the planets vs. their distances.
· Get an overview of the solar system.
· 50 points are possible
Introduction
It is easy to flip to the index of an astronomy textbook to discover that, say, the Sun lies 150 million kilometers away from Earth. It is far more difficult (if not impossible), however, to picture this distance in our mind. In this exercise, we will learn to access the often unpalatable distances encountered in astronomy by simply scaling the huge distances to more recognizable, familiar numbers. So long as every distance within the system of interest is scaled by the same
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Show your work! 1,394,000/7000 = 199.1428 cm.
6. Which planet has the shortest day? Which planet has the longest day? How do you know? Jupiter has the shortest day at only about 10 of our hours. Venus has the longest day at about 243 of our years.
7. On which planet would you weigh the most? The least? Why? I would weigh the most on Jupiter because the surface gravity on that planet is over 2 times the amount on Earth. I would weigh the least on Mercury because the surface gravity there is less than half of Earth’s surface gravity.
8. Would your mass change if you traveled from planet to planet? Why? No because mass doesn’t change from planet to planet it stays the same no matter where you are.
9. How do the distances between the inner planets compare with the distances between the outer planets? The distances between the inner planets are a lot shorter than compared to the distances between the outer planets.
10. Which two planets are closest to Earth? The two planets that are closest to Earth are Venus and Mars.
11. Find the average distance of Pluto from the Sun. Using the same scale as Procedure B, calculate the scaled distance that Pluto should be on your model. Show your work! 5,906,376,200 / 25,000,000 = 236.25cm ~ 236 cm
13. The next nearest star in our Milky Way Galaxy is Alpha Centauri. It is about 41,000,000,000,000 km. Using the scale from Procedure B, calculate how far Alpha Centauri would be on our scale. Show your work!
3. The distance between scale markings on the horizontal scale is 100 km. Comparison of the vertical and horizontal scales indicates that the vertical scale is exaggerated [(10)(100)(1000)] times relative to the horizontal scale.
Scaled Distance Venus-Sun: 1.08 x 108 Km * (1 meter/2.87 x 108 Km) = 0.38 m
The farther away a star is, the less its parallax. The light year is a unit used to express stellar distance, which is the distance light travels in a year, which is approximately 9.5 trillion kilometers (5.8 trillion miles). The parallax angles are very small. Proxima Centauri is the parallax angle nearest to the star. It is less than one second or arc, which equals 1/3600 of a degree. A human finger is roughly 1 degree wide. The distances to stars are so large that conventional units such as kilometers or astronomical units are often too cumbersome to use.
Although Earth and Venus are known as "The SisterPlanets" they both have varying factors. Today I will be talking about Venus. References of Venus go as far as 1600 BCE. It is named after the Roman
Step 1. I know that there are 7 new stars formed yearly in the galaxy, the number of stars is represented by R*. This is the annual rate of star formation that is adaptable for any life. So R* will equal 7 new stars formed every year.
Conducting this lab first we went through the steps oh how to find the apparent magnitude of the sun at different distances. This experience walked us through how the distance has a direct affect on the apparent magnitude of a star. It also noted the change of astronomical units to parsecs. Secondly, we completed a couple more table’s of the comparison of apparent magnitude to the distance of the stars Sirius and Betelgeuse. Even though these
Astronomers have found that Pluto is 2.66 billion miles away from earth . They used the reflective telescope to find this out.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, “all” the planets? All across the globe basically everyone says Pluto isn’t a planet. I mean sure it’s not like the others it does strange movements. But isn’t that like humanity? I mean, we don’t look the same, we are all different shapes, sizes colors, we make weird moments, does that make us not human?
The atmospheric conditions of planets are related to gravity strength and temperature of the atmosphere. Atmosphere can be retained for a longer duration when the gravity is high and the temperature of atmosphere is low. [1] Table shows that the gravity of Earth is the highest, followed by Venus, and Mars. The gravity of Earth and Venus are similar. Therefore, the atmosphere of both Earth and Venus can be retained for a longer period of time, while Mars’ atmosphere can only be retained in a shorter
Neptune is the farthest planet from the sun, it is the most dense out of the giant planets of our solar
There are various methods of determining the distances of stars. Some of them include the variable stars theory, parallax method, use of color and the expanding universe theory, just to mention a few. The method that is the most common and can easily be explained is parallax, which is well explained through illustration. When one holds an object high up front so that it blocks your front view and close one eye in different turns, the item appears to move in relation to the item in front. When both eyes are open one may get an idea of how far the object may be and the distance is obtained by the length of direction change, and this theory is known as parallax.
To begin, much like space, the videos and books read and listened to, covered a lot of ground. What these sources explained was simply how big space is and our microscopic place is inside such a colossal surrounding of stars, galaxies, Nebulas, and so much more. To first get a reference point of our closer neighbors, we were brought through an adventure in the countryside with Bill Nye to acknowledge the unimaginable distances between the planets. For example, when earth was scaled to the size of a baseball, it took over well over two miles to reach an absolutely tiny scale model of Pluto. This is striking on it's own and even more staggering is the fact that Pluto is but a inconsequential speck on the map of the solar system, galaxy, and universe
Furthermore, The Size, Mass, and Orbit are the most interesting things about these planets. Now the first planet is Mercury. The planet Mercury has a mean radius of 2440 km and a mass of 3.3022×1023 kg, which means Mercury is the smallest planet in our Solar System and its equivalent in size to 0.38 Earths. Mercury also has the most eccentric orbit of any planet in the Solar System. Its distance from the Sun ranges from 46 to 70 million km, and takes 87.969 Earth days to complete a full orbit. The average orbital speed of Mercury is 47.362 km/s; it also takes 58.646 days to complete a single rotation. When its Combined with the eccentric orbit, it takes 176 Earth days for the sun to rise and set on Mercury. The second planet is Venus who has been referred to as Earth’s “sister planet”.
Venus is the 2nd planet from the Sun. Venus' reflective nature and close proximity to Earth are major factors in it's being one of the brightest objects in the sky after the Sun and Earth's moon. It is often referred to as
This makes the Venusian day equal to 117 earth days. It is thought that this slow rotation may be the reason why Venus has no magnetic field.