Week 8: Presentations

 1. Lab (Presentation Notes) 

This week in lab, each table group presented on a different topic. The topic that my group chose was the lifecycles of stars. We created a presentation to share with the class. 

Our presentation:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1N_RsLWHDZki6GBpVk1CK1nqDpsncfjiizCP9SeV1I2U/edit?usp=sharing

Origin of the Universe

• Scientists believe that the universe is 13.7 billion years old from the Big Bang. Nothing existed before this. 
• Light did not come into existence until 300 thousand years later.
• Eventually stars were created which formed to galaxies and lead to where we today. 
• In order to get a star you need nuclear fusion. A star turns on when atoms fuse together. Stars nuclear fuse up to the element of iron.

Galaxies

• Galaxies consist of stars, planets, and clouds of gas and dust that are all bound by gravity. 
• The order of galaxies forming is a 'chicken and egg" situation. 
• Galaxies can have as few as 10 million stars in a dwarf galaxy to 100 trillion stars in a massive giant galaxy. 
• Dr. Nancy Grace Roman is known as the "Mother of Hubble." 
• The Milky Way is 100,000 lightyears. 
• Most scientist classify the average galaxy to have 2 billion stars. 

Origin of the Earth

• The solar system settles into the form it is still in today. 
• Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are rocky planets because of their proximity to the sun. 
• The Earth was believed to be made of molten lava originally. 
• The collision of a "proto-planet" with Earth caused the Earth's axis and Moon. 
• The layers of the atmosphere are the exosphere, thermosphere, mesosphere, stratosphere, and troposphere. We live in the troposphere and it holds all of out air. 
• The seasons are caused by the Earth's axis and where the sunlight is directly hitting. 

Black Holes

• Black holes are formed when massive stars collapse under their own gravity at the end of their life cycle. 
• People used to think that black holes were mathematical oddities rather than physical objects. 
• There are likely millions of black holes in our galaxy and we will probably never know where they are. 
• Our sun is on an arm of the galaxy. We spin around a black hole in the center of the galaxy.

Space Travel

• In 2015 the Mars rover captured that sunsets on Mars are blue.
• Sputnik was the first official satellite to orbit the Earth.
• The first animal to go to space was a dog. on Sputnik II.
• NASA was created in October 1958 as a new government agency.
• Expedition 70 is currently taking place with 7 crew members.
• Private space travel: space exploration that takes part outside of government entities. 
• Odysseus landed on the Moon on February 22nd and is the first landing on the moon since 1972.

2. Lecture

In lecture, I learned that the Earth did not come from the Big Bang. I learned that when we get many atoms together, that is when nuclear fusion occurs and a star is created. From the Big Bang, we gained only hydrogen atoms. From the hydrogen atoms, they fused together again and again to create a star and the supernova creates the rest of the periodic table of elements in its explosion.

I also learned that our Sun is about 4.65 billion years old and only about half-way through its full supply. In about 5 billion years, our Sun will inflate enough to burn up the Earth. In space, as stars continue to burn up its fuel, the mass of the star decreases. As the star loses mass, gravity also decreases. Because of the decrease in gravity, the star is not able to hold itself together as well and it continues to expand slightly. When it expands too much, it goes into the next phase of its lifecycle. 

I learned that most solar systems have two suns. One sun orbits around the other sun. Our solar system only has one sun. The closes sun to us would take us 81,000 years to get to at the fastest we know how to travel. This sun is known as Alpha Centari.