Last Friday, we spent class reviewing eachother's constellation fact sheets. Each student recieved 3 people for whom he or she was to read their sheets and grade them. Because that class was short and unchanging, I am also blogging for today's science class on May 11.
Today at the beginning of class we had a quick discussion about Branimir; the astrophycsicist that came to our class and talked to us last week. We wrote him some of our comments and criticisms on his lecture, which included the following:
Criticisms:
Lack of media
Shorten his bullets on his powerpoint
Speak louder and clearer
Interact with the students more
Simplify some vocab
Compliments:
Showed enthusiasm and true knowledge of the subject
Gorgeous pictures
Interesting at most parts
Branimir has never taught to students our age; and I think he deserves an extra arm of applause for having the courage to do so now. In about three days, he becomes a doctor of astrophysics.
From the discussion, Ms.D continued to show us the Star Notes Powerpoint we had started to watch in one of our previous classes. Our final exam will include most of this information, which is why I will include a summary of the most important facts below.
Stars:
-Blue stars are the partiers. They are hot, big, young and die fast.
-White stars are middle everything. Middle aged, middle sized and middle brightness.
-Red stars are old, colder and dying.
A globular cluster is a glob of stars
Galaxies:
Galaxies are large systems of stars in dust (interstellar matter)
There are several million galaxies with several trillion stars in each one.
There are three main types of galaxy:
-Spiral
-Elliptical
-Irregular
Spiral galaxies:
Our galaxy is a spiral galaxy
Young populations
Have lots of interstellar matter
Has arms and a a black hole in the middle
Elliptical galaxies:
-Old populations
-Very little interstellar matter
Irregular galaxy:
-No shape, distorted due to gravity from neighbouring galaxies
We know other galaxies exist because of the use of math, and pictures taken using radio waves
Additionally, we learned what a Hertzbrung Russel graph is. It is a graph that explains how stars age.
Next, we were taught how a star dies. There are basically three different ways of stellar death, and how they go is based on their mass.
-If the star is the mass of our sun:
Red Dwarf: Running out of fuel
Red Giant: Out of fuel
Nova-Explodes
White dwarf-Hot, small star, dead when it runs out of energy
No worries, our sun won't die for another 4 million years, and we'll most likely die out by then anyways.
-If the star is 4x the mass of our Sun
Same steps as Sun
Past White Dwarf
Electrons+protons combine = neutrons= neutron star!
The neutron star then becomes stronger than nucleur forces inside of an atom
-If the star is 10x the mass of our sun
-Same steps as previous deaths
-Past neutron star
-Collapses past nucleur forces
-Forms a gravity well-cosmic vacuum cleaner
-Which then turns into a black hole
In the middle of our discussion, we also talked about atoms and molecules , and learned that zombies are actually just reanimated atoms.
At the end of class we began a discussion on the Big Bang, but ran out of time. For the next class the volleyball girls will not be here to take notes so I hope the next blogger does a supreme job of summing up the class.
We have no homework for Thursday.
Also the following link is something spiffy I found that stimulates all of the astronomical events we discussed in class.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoLvOvGW3Tk
Additionally, something I personally found intriguing was that when we look into space, we look into the past since things are so many light years away. For example, if there is a galaxy one billion light years away, we won't know its dead until a billion years from now.
The next blogger is Cornelia.
Hey Hana,
ReplyDeleteThis is a great post to recap the last class. I loved your varying information and since I couldn't write down all of the notes in class, it was very helpful for the extra information on stars. Also, it was easy to understand and clearly formated to be easily comprehended. One suggestion is that it is a little too spread out in seperate paragraphs; making it a little hard to read. All in all, great job. (:
-Ines
I really liked the ending paragraph Hana! It was really interesting and it was great that you shared that with us. Your post is really informative, but I would recommend putting the lists into bullet points; or, as you did later, hyphens (or are they dashes?). Howver I really liked the word choice you had. You have great descriptions of all the different galaxies and stars, but it would've been cool to add pictures to help us enderstand better.
ReplyDeleteOverall, a great post!
Good post Hanna,
ReplyDeleteYou did a very good job of summarizing what the 8th graders did in class on Tuesday. The layout is very well laid out. However I have a few recommendations to improve the post. The part about the star dying could have been more clear. The URL of the you tube video could be hyper-linked. Also instead of coloring important words you could have made them bold. I am also curious about one thing. The class discussed many ways of star dying and black holes. I am wondering whether or not pulsars were mentioned in the class because they are also a stellar irregularity. Good post.
As the pictures you have included are the first thing you see when you look at the post, I will comment on them first. Well, there's nothing much I could actually say about them except saying that they are really nice. Only the second picture looks a little bit strange, because the explosion looks like a normal explosion we could se on Earth, with fire and all these things, but I thought that there was no oxygen in space, and fire needs oxygen to exist.
ReplyDeleteI liked how you have laid out your text. It is clear and understandable, and colors are well used. Maybe except the "white" which is almost unreadable.
I like the information that you have added, as it is also very clear, and I might use it to study for the final exam, if you don't mind.
By the way, is astrophy...the second word in blue really spelled that way? It looks a it weird. Kat is right, you should add some pictures throughout the post corresponding to what you are talking about. Oh, and another compliment: I had to think hard to find something bad about the post :)
Hey Hana,
ReplyDeleteI like that you did not used to many colors in your blog post. I think that your blog post had a lot of great information. I also really like how you put your blog post together. For example you made some important words in bold or in a different color. One think i would change is the font. You could maybe make the font bigger on some parts. I really find it interesting that your class is learning about stars, black wholes and galaxies.
Antonia
Hey Hana! Well, I do have to say you did a very good job in summing up what happened during class. The organization of the writing was clear. I really liked how you wrote all the notes of what you learned during class. The notes were to the point and I was able to learn some science through your scribe post! Also next time try not to use white as your text color, because they were quite hard to read. I did spot one spelling error as well. It is each other's not eachother's. So maybe next time you can copy paste your scribe post on Word and do spell check. Besides that your scribe post was really well written.
ReplyDeleteWow Hana! Your blog was flooded by information. I like your use of color, you didn't put too much and it didn't make it distracting. A few things you could improve on is making the headings maybe more eye catching.Also,for the next scribe who's posting could be in a bigger font. I like how you wrote your opinion about what you thought and not only information.
ReplyDeleteHey Hana!
ReplyDeleteHere are my impressions about your post
What I liked:
-The idea of having pictures is not bad, but you could improve it by introducing more the picture in the text. Putting 2 pictures at the top alone is too easy and simple I think.
- You covered everything we did in class which is really good.
-It was clear; the bullet helped a lot to make it clear
-You gave the link to a Youtube video which was good; the video was showing simulation of Black Holes, Neutron stars, etc. The video has no sound, it is simple but fine because it shows what we talked about.
-The font is clear.
-The colour is sometimes used very well and sometimes not. I’ll come to that later.
What you could improve:
- I like the way that you put a different color for each different star. It work well for Red Dwarf, Red Giant and Nova, but it don’t work well for white Dwarf, the white is not a good color to use in this case.
-Like I said the two pictures aren’t introduced in off in the text and are not in off for everything you said.
-Sometimes you put some words like “astrophysicist” in a different color, if you do that it has to be for something. For example you could put the selected word in a hyperlink to a page that has the definition or just write the definition after it.
-Next time also try to put the link to the video in hyperlink or to embed it.
Overall: Good post! It is clear and understandable; it helps a lot if somebody is sick this day. Continue Like that!
Dear Hana,
ReplyDeleteI think you did an amazing job on this! There's so much information that I didn't catch in class so this helped a lot. And thanks for telling us that our final exam will include this information.
Nice job!
Hana - this post covers everything we did during class. You could explain a few things with a bit more detail, but you mostly have it right. Keep in mind the Sun will not explode for another 4 BILLION years, not million as you wrote. I did like your hyperlink to the animation that went over many of the things we covered in class. I think you could have had a few more pictures throughout of these things discussed and could have explained the two you did have at the beginning of the post. Overall, nice use of color, although in places you could have been more consistent. You forgot to include a real-life relationship, which is the newest requirement for blogging in the fourth quarter. Good work. ~Ms. D.
ReplyDelete