Week 8 Science Methods 2

  1. What did you do in the lab?   

2. What was the big question? 

3. What did you learn in Thursday's discussion? 

4. Read the online textbook, Chapter 5 

        1. What did you learn? 

        2. What was most helpful? 

        3. What do you need more information on? 

5. What questions, concerns, and/or comments do you have?   

    In lab this week we presented on our different topics. My group presented on the origin of the Earth. We heard about the origin of the universe, the lifecycles of stars, galaxies, black holes, and the exploration of space: past, present, and future. I learned more about how the earth is constantly shifting due to plate tectonics. I also learned that the shifting of the plates can cause different things like earthquakes, mountains, and trenches.  I also learned that there are 2 trillion different galaxies, so it is crazy to think we are the only life. It's crazy to think how little we really are.  

The big questions were, "Was the star that exploded bigger or smaller than our sun? I said bigger because it had to be big enough to create everything. 

In the discussion this week, we talked more deeply about the topics that were presented on Tuesday. 13.7 billion years ago, there was nothing.  We learned that the Earth was not created during the Big Bang and that it was not an explosion.  We then talked about stars and that they began to form about 12.7 billion years ago. The earth was created 4.65 billion years ago. The closer you are to the sun, the more dense, rocky, and less gas they have. There are three different types of galaxies. There are spiral, elliptical, and irregular. There is a possibility of there being 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets. Each galaxy contains about 200 billion stars. I also learned that with teaching, if you don't understand or know an answer to your student's questions, you should say, "I don't know, but let's learn together." I also learned about Katie Bouman and how she is the only person who has ever taken a picture of a black hole. I also learned that women should have been the ones to go to space. They are lighter and eat less food.

I learned from the reading that all stars begin their lives as clouds of gas and dust that are called nebulae. The particles start to attract, so their mass increases. It ends up having enough particles that are under so much heat that a nuclear fusion can occur. The star ends up igniting, and it is now an official star. I also learned that a galaxy is a collection of billions of stars, gas, and dust that are being held by gravity.  The most helpful to me was, again, the videos. I'm such a visual learner, so watching these helps me understand the content so much more. I don't think I need any more information. I love that we are talking about different women and their roles in these discoveries.