Week 7 - Sun, Earth, and Moon

Lab:

    Today in lab we built our own model of the beginning of the solar system, including the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Earth's moon, and Mars. We had to scale it to size but make it small enough that we didn't have to leave the building. We were allowed to use our resources and went to google to start finding out how big the plants were so that we could scale it down to something we could actually make. We were running into a bit of trouble figuring out how to scale the size and distance down so that it was possible for us to make. Ted gave us a website called Exploratorium where we could enter in how big our sun was, and it would scale the other planets diameter and orbit size accordingly so that we could make our model a bit easier. It took us until the last second to get it done but seeing the size difference between our perception of the distance between planets vs. the actual distance, connecting back to misconceptions we have that were never addressed and corrected by teachers, and that we had up until discussion. 

Lecture:

In lecture, I learned more about the Earth and it's origin as well as the Earth and it's tilt. The Earth takes a year to orbit the sun, but our moon only takes 28 days to orbit our planet. I learned the the moon is actually drifting from the Earth which was something I never knew. I liked that we went through all of the different theories for the moon's origin and the science behind why each isn't true. The moon formed when Theia collided with Earth, creating our moon and giving the Earth it's tilt. 

Questions, Concerns, and/or Comments

I need more help understanding the moon questions you've been giving during class. I like get it some of the time, but then other questions throw me off. I'm not sure if it's the wording of the problems or what they're asking of us.