Study Guide for Astronomy Test
Star Cluster:
Spread out
Far away
Some are brighter than other
Not uniformed
Different colors
Thinking about science:
Gather information about the universe through observations and experiments
Organize the information we gather
Develop theories to explain observations and predict future observations
Test these theories with more observations
Powerful- sometime beyond intuition
Astronomical numbers
Light travels at 300,000,000 meter per second
There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy
How far is a star?
Alpha centauri is 44,000,000,000,000 m
Dealing with extreme numbers?
Scale models (ex. Bball and softball)
Proper units (inches vs meters vs miles)
Scientific notation
700,000= 7x10^5 km
When properly written this number will be between 1.0 and 10.0
Arithmetic with scientific notation
Multiplication> add exponents e.g.
Units in Astronomy
One astronomical unit is the average distance from the earth to the sun
1 AU= 1.4x10^11 meters
Light travels at 3x10^8 meters per second
One light year is the distance light travels in one year
1 ly= 9x10^15 meters
The night sky
Air/light pollution takes away from view of the milky way
rare to experience clear view constellations= clusters of stars that create a picture helps us find our way around the sky arcturus is a red star and spica is a blue star
Stars are all different sizes and distances from us
But they are very far away so they appear as points in the sky while they’re actually far apart
When we look at the night sky, the stars appear to lie on a dome above our heads
We lack depth perception when looking at things this far away
The Celestial Sphere
Within the sphere are the stars
Stars appear to lie in fixed positions on the celestial sphere
Polaris, aka north star, is NOT brightest in the sky
Directly above the north pole
Studying stars proves that earth is round
We can only see the part of the celestial sphere that is above our horizon
We call this
Spread out
Far away
Some are brighter than other
Not uniformed
Different colors
Thinking about science:
Gather information about the universe through observations and experiments
Organize the information we gather
Develop theories to explain observations and predict future observations
Test these theories with more observations
Powerful- sometime beyond intuition
Astronomical numbers
Light travels at 300,000,000 meter per second
There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy
How far is a star?
Alpha centauri is 44,000,000,000,000 m
Dealing with extreme numbers?
Scale models (ex. Bball and softball)
Proper units (inches vs meters vs miles)
Scientific notation
700,000= 7x10^5 km
When properly written this number will be between 1.0 and 10.0
Arithmetic with scientific notation
Multiplication> add exponents e.g.
Units in Astronomy
One astronomical unit is the average distance from the earth to the sun
1 AU= 1.4x10^11 meters
Light travels at 3x10^8 meters per second
One light year is the distance light travels in one year
1 ly= 9x10^15 meters
The night sky
Air/light pollution takes away from view of the milky way
rare to experience clear view constellations= clusters of stars that create a picture helps us find our way around the sky arcturus is a red star and spica is a blue star
Stars are all different sizes and distances from us
But they are very far away so they appear as points in the sky while they’re actually far apart
When we look at the night sky, the stars appear to lie on a dome above our heads
We lack depth perception when looking at things this far away
The Celestial Sphere
Within the sphere are the stars
Stars appear to lie in fixed positions on the celestial sphere
Polaris, aka north star, is NOT brightest in the sky
Directly above the north pole
Studying stars proves that earth is round
We can only see the part of the celestial sphere that is above our horizon
We call this