DIY Mini Solar System Walk

DIY Solar System Walk When exploring the solar system, we have to start with 2 main ideas--- the planets and the incredible space between them. What is a planet? We have 8 planets in our solar system—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. To be a planet, an object has to meet all 3 of the points below: 1. Be round 2. Orbit the sun 3. Be the biggest object in your orbit. The Earth is a planet. The moon is not a planet because it orbits the Earth not the sun. Pluto is not a planet because it fails #3. On its trip around the sun, it crosses paths with the planet Neptune. The two won’t hit, but Neptune is much bigger than Pluto. Distances in the Solar System Everything in the solar system is very far apart. The Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun. If you traveled 65 miles per hour, it would take 59, 615 days to get there. Instead of using miles, astronomers measure distances in Astronomical Units (AU). 1 AU = 93 million miles, the distance between the Earth and the Sun. It’s really hard to imagine how far apart things are in space. To help understand these distances, we can make a scale model. In our solar system model, you are going to measure distances using your own steps. Directions: Start at your picture of the sun. For each planet, count your steps following the chart. Then place your picture of the planet at that spot. 1 step = 12 million miles Planet Steps Total Steps from Sun Mercury 3 3 Venus 2.5 5.5 Earth 2 7.5 Mars 4 11.5 Asteroid Belt 9 20.5 Jupiter 19 39.5 Saturn 33 72.5 Uranus 73.5 140 Neptune 83.3 229 Pluto 72 301 Math problem! To figure out how far away each planet is from the sun, multiple the last column by 12 million. For the Earth: 7.5 x 12 million = 90 million miles. Our model is close, but not perfect. That is ok. Translations done by Alyssa Leinani Lozi, a student of Ka Haka 'Ula O Ke'elikōlani Research done by Alexis Ann Acohido Mahalo Leinani and Alexis!.

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The Solar System
5 The Solar System R. Lynne Jones, Steven R. Chesley, Paul A. Abell, Michael E. Brown, Josef Durech,ˇ Yanga R. Fernández,Alan W. Harris, Matt J. Holman, Zeljkoˇ Ivezić,R. Jedicke, Mikko Kaasalainen, Nathan A. Kaib, Zoran Kneˇzević,Andrea Milani, Alex Parker, Stephen T. Ridgway, David E. Trilling, Bojan Vrˇsnak LSST will provide huge advances in our knowledge of millions of astronomical objects “close to home’”– the small bodies in our Solar System. Previous studies of these small bodies have led to dramatic changes in our understanding of the process of planet formation and evolution, and the relationship between our Solar System and other systems. Beyond providing asteroid targets for space missions or igniting popular interest in observing a new comet or learning about a new distant icy dwarf planet, these small bodies also serve as large populations of “test particles,” recording the dynamical history of the giant planets, revealing the nature of the Solar System impactor population over time, and illustrating the size distributions of planetesimals, which were the building blocks of planets. In this chapter, a brief introduction to the different populations of small bodies in the Solar System (§ 5.1) is followed by a summary of the number of objects of each population that LSST is expected to find (§ 5.2). Some of the Solar System science that LSST will address is presented through the rest of the chapter, starting with the insights into planetary formation and evolution gained through the small body population orbital distributions (§ 5.3). The effects of collisional evolution in the Main Belt and Kuiper Belt are discussed in the next two sections, along with the implications for the determination of the size distribution in the Main Belt (§ 5.4) and possibilities for identifying wide binaries and understanding the environment in the early outer Solar System in § 5.5.
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