Thursday, March 18, 2010

Planets, Dwarf Planets, & More

Today in class, we reviewed the moon's phases, listed all the planets in our solar system, and talked a little bit about dwarf planets.

Some words that were used in today’s class:

equinox- equal day and equal night ( 12h of light and 12 h of darkness)


solstice- longest day (Summer) and shortest day (Winter)
light year- the distance that light travels in one year

electromagnetic spectrum- UV, IR, X-rays, gamma, microwaves, radio waves, and visible light
Today we went over the eight planets in our Solar System. To remember them, a student showed us a pneumonic device.
Our eight planets in our Solar System:

Mercury (My)

Venus (Very)

Earth (Educated)

Mars (Mom)

Jupiter (Just)

Saturn (Sold)

Uranus (Us)

Neptune (Nine)

Below is a picture of all the planets:


Trip through the Solar System video :http://http//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y72EizrCkKY&feature=fvsr

After "Nine" there should be "Pizzas." "Pizzas" represented the planet Pluto, however now Pluto is not a part of the Planet group, it is now considered a dwarf planet. A dwarf planet has different qualities than planets. Some of those qualities are its size and clear orbit. Pluto is not the only dwarf planet, there are 5 dwarf planets in total. They are:

Pluto


Ceres

Eris

MakeMake

Haumea

Past Pluto, there is the Kuiper Belt, past the Kuiper Belt is the Oort Cloud.

More about the Kuiper Belt & Oort Cloud : http://nineplanets.org/kboc.html




In between Mars and Jupiter is the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt is a space between those planets, filled with loads of asteroids. Asteroids are rocky metallic things that orbit the Sun.
Random facts from Class:
The light from the Sun to Earth takes 8 minutes!
A blue moon is when there are TWO full moons in one month!
The Earth spins counter-clock wise!
The speed of sound is 340.29 m/s!
The speed of light is 300,000 km/s
Our galaxy, the milky way, is 100,000 light years away!

Next scriber - Kamil
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5 comments:

  1. EmmaMarch 25, 2010 at 8:28 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. EmmaMarch 25, 2010 at 8:30 PM

    Great Job Holly! I admired it how you made use of good colors, made your point clear, and gave a clear summary of what had happened during our class period. I do, however,recommend that you make yourself more clear for the last part of your blog: क्लास ? What is it?
    Overall, Great Job! (;

    Emma (minor edit)

    ReplyDelete
  3. MurttaghMarch 29, 2010 at 4:59 PM

    Good post. From it I could understand what the 8th grade was doing. However, I believe you could have explained some things in more detail and compressed the post a little bit more.
    Bryce minor edit 1

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  4. ms.dMarch 31, 2010 at 11:19 PM

    Holly - your post overall looks good after all of our efforts to get the pictures in place. Your link to the KBO works well, but for some reason the YouTube doesn't seem to want to connect. Nice use of color, but be careful of over-doing it. Plus, I think you could have gone a bit further with some of the science (like the KBOs and what they are). Overall, nice work :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. DanielApril 1, 2010 at 4:00 PM

    I liked the layout of your post, making it very clear, and very easy to find the esact information you need. Dark blue is my favorite color, so I liked your color choice too ;)
    It was also a good idea to post random facts, which makes the post less boring for someone who might not be interested in astronomy.
    Daniel

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