Scale the Universe

Exploring your Universe from Inner to Outer Space

Presented by: Sarah Silva and Phil Plait

NASA Education and Public Outreach

Sonoma State University

The NASA E/PO Program at Sonoma State University

• A group of eight people working collaboratively to educate the public about current and future NASA high energy astrophysics/astronomy missions.

• Led by Prof. Lynn CominskySwift

GLAST

XMM-Newton

What is GLAST?

• GLAST: Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope

• Planned for launch in 2007

• GLAST has two instruments:

– Large Area Telescope (LAT)

– GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM)

• GLAST will look at many different objects within the energy range of 10keV to 300GeV.

LAT

GBM

Smallest to Largest

• Name the smallest things that you can think of…

• What are some of the largest things you can think of?

• What about the most distant object?

Distance Tabs

• On your desk there should be one or more pieces of paper with masking tape on them.

• In groups - place these in order on the brown paper.

• The left hand side of the paper should have the small scale items and the right hand side of the paper should have the large scale items.

Well Known Objects…

• What was the most interesting thing that you found while lining up the distance tabs?

• Going back to our original list of small and large objects…– Is there anything on this list that wasn’t

mentioned in the tabs?

Earth and Moon System

• At your desk there should be precut moon rulers.

• Assemble them with the tape located on the tables.

• Using the moon rulers answer the questions on the two activity sheets.

• NOTE: For the second activity substitute the moon ball (golf ball) for the paper plate.

The Universe is a VERY Big Place

At least 13 billion light-years (or about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers)

It is full of VERY big numbers!

And small!

Scientific Notation and tens

10000 = 1x 104

1000= 1x 103

100 = 1x 102

10 = 1x 101

1 = 1x 100

0.1 = 1x 10-1

0.01 = 1x 10-2

0.001 = 1x 10-3

0.0001 = 1x 10-4

How this works:

The Booklet

• This book is organized into 3-stand-alone sections:– A:

• A1: Orders of Magnitude• A2: Unit Analysis

– B:• B1: Ordering Distance – Sticky (what we just did!) and Cutout• B2: Using a Log Scale

– C:• C1: Scale the Universe (1)• C2: Scale the Universe (2)• C3: Scale the Universe (3)• C4: Proportional Thinking• C5: Ordering Time

Brainstorm Time

• How can we use this in our science classroom?– Biology Lessons– Astronomy Lessons– Introductions to scientific notation– ….

Resources

• GLAST Education and Public Mission Website– http://glast.sonoma.edu

• Downloadable materials for this book (AND MORE):– http://glast.sonoma.edu/teachers/teachers.html

• More Great materials from TOPS:– http://topscience.org/