Category: Astronomy

Every Day is Earth Day

2/28/2023

Stephen R. Swinburne
Lifelong Naturalist

The Earth Day Flag created by John McConnell

The celebrated astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, said, “People never look up.” Tyson or Starman, as he is called, is right. Look up and you’ll see amazing stuff: puffy cumulonimbus clouds rising 60,000 feet, broken rainbows, blue skies bluer than blue, Venus and Mars huddling beside the new moon, the Milky Way.

When you look up, you can’t help realize you are standing, feet firmly planted, on planet Earth. We are attached in a very physical way to this place...this planet called Earth.

So, not only look up, but, as Rachel Carson declared in many of her writings, “Look around, and down, and closer.”

Whether you are looking up or looking down, we celebrate our home planet every year on April 22. This celebration or “birthday” is called Earth Day and it has been going on since 1970 after Gaylord Nelson, a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, proposed a day of national focus on environmental issues. Buoyed by the success of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, about the concern for living organisms and the environment, Earth Day 1970 set out to raise public awareness for the health and harmony of the planet. People from all walks of life— young and old, farmers and urban dwellers, liberals and conservatives— banded together and achieved great things. The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

And now, forty-six years later, Earth Day 2016 has gone truly global. Around the world, people celebrate Earth Day with massive rallies, marches and festivals. But for many people it is not just an annual event, but all the quiet acts and the simple habits performed throughout the year. For instance, I make it a habit of recycling every piece of plastic I use (or as much as humanly possible). Less plastic that ends up in the oceans means happier and healthier sea turtles and whales.

If you want some ideas about how you can demonstrate your support for environmental protection, you might start by checking out the book, Recycle This Book - 100 Top Children’s Book Authors Tell You How To Go Green.

And if you link to the Earth Day website, you can take a peek at all the great activities planned around the world on April 22, 2018.

Let’s make this the best Earth Day ever...all year long!

With essays from renowned children’s book authors such as Ann Brashares, Jeanne DuPrau, Caroline B. Cooney, Laurie Halse Anderson, Bruce Coville, Gennifer Choldenko, and more than 100 others, each piece is an informative and inspiring call to kids of all ages to understand what’s happening to the environment, and to take action in saving our world. Helpful tips and facts are interspersed throughout.

Part of the award-winning Scientists in the Field book series, Sea Turtle Scientist introduces Dr. Kimberly Stewart, “the turtle lady,” and describes her work on St. Kitts with endangered loggerhead sea turtles. The book provides extensive information on sea turtles and Dr. Stewart’s research, as well as the efforts of WIDECAST to preserve and protect these amazing creatures. For more information, visit the author's website.
Stephen R. Swinburne is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more.

MLA 8 Citation

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What Is a Light Year?

10/3/2022

1 Comment

by David M. Schwartz
the amazing, engaging, math exponent

A light year is not a year that has gone on a diet. It is not a year that’s been trimmed to 300 days. It’s not a year spent under high-wattage lamps. A light year isn’t any kind of year.

    A light year is a distance. It is a vast distance; the distance light travels in a year. To appreciate a light year, you have to understand how fast light travels.

    The speed of light is truly mind-boggling: 186,000 miles per . . . second. That’s “per second,” not “per hour.” In one tick-tock second, light travels a distance of 186,000 miles. If it could go in circles, it could travel around the earth more than seven times in just one second! But light travels in straight lines, not in circles. Imagine something traveling that fast in a straight line—not for a second, not for a minute, not for an hour, not for a day, but for an entire year. The distance it goes in that year is called a light year.

    A light year is a convenient unit of measure when distances are enormous. You could talk about the same distances in miles. It's about 5,878,499,810,000 (5 trillion, 878 billion, 499 million, 810 thousand ) of them. But these measurements are so large that they are unwieldy. It's much easier to just name that enormous distance with two simple words: a "light year."

    The star closest to our solar system is Proxima Centauri. Some of the light that leaves Proxima Centauri goes to Earth, cruising along at 186,000 miles per second. At that speed, light takes about 4.2 years to get to Earth from Proxima Centauri So how far away is Proxima Centauri? It is 4.2 light years away.

    To give you an idea of how far that is, imagine going to Proxima Centauri in a spaceship traveling at the speed of the space shuttle — about ten miles per second. (That’s much faster than airplanes can fly.) You would get there in about 70,000 years.

    Our Sun is much closer than Proxima Centauri. It is 93 million miles away. There is another way to refer to the distance from the earth to the Sun. Light leaving the Sun takes about eight minutes to get to Earth, so we say the Sun is eight “light minutes” away. If you traveled at the speed of light, you could get there in eight minutes. Have a nice trip!

© David M. Schwartz, 2014

David Schwartz has been fascinated by big numbers and big distances ever since he was a little boy riding his bicycle, wondering “How long would it take for me to ride to Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years away?” He wrote about light years in his math alphabet book G Is for Googol.

David is a member of iNK’s Authors on Call. He can visit in your classroom via interactive video conferencing. Learn more here.

MLA 8 Citation
Schwartz, David M. "What Is a Light Year?" Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 14 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/what-is-a-light-year.

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Spaced Out

5/3/2022

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Alexandra Siy

“STEM through the lens”

Do you ever feel spaced-out before you take a test? Yes or no, let’s go!

1.     TRUE or FALSE?
It’s possible for a spacecraft to fly from Earth to Venus, to Mars, back to Earth, then to Saturn, out to Pluto, back to Jupiter, and come home to Earth on one tank of fuel.

2.     It’s possible for a spacecraft to fly all over the solar system on one tank of fuel because of:

a.      the sling-shot effect
b.     gravity assist
c.      swing-by
d.     all of the above
e.      none of the above

            The sling-shot effect, also known as a swing-by or gravity assist, is used to accelerate a spacecraft. Acceleration means to change the speed and/or the direction of a moving body. A spacecraft that is speeding up, slowing down, or following a curved path is accelerating.
            Gravity accelerates objects everywhere in the Universe. When you ride your bike up a hill it takes a lot of effort to make it to the top because the Earth is massive compared to you, and gravity pulls you toward its center. When you coast down the other side, gravity is your friend!
            Spacecraft can use the gravity of a planet to accelerate. Picture a spacecraft falling toward a planet. The spacecraft will crash unless it steers away.

3.     As a spacecraft accelerates toward a planet, the motion of the planet is also affected by the gravity exerted by:

a.     the spacecraft
b.     the Sun
c.     cosmic rays
d.     both (a) and (b)
e.      both (b) and (c)
f.       all of the above
g.      none of the above

            All bodies in space, no matter how big or small, exert gravity on each other. Planets stay in orbit around the sun because of gravity. A planet is also affected by the tiny mass of a spacecraft. Gravity assist was used to increase the speed of Voyager 1 by 36,000 mph on its swing by Jupiter, which sling shot it to Saturn. And Jupiter slowed down infinitesimally, at a rate of 12 inches per one trillion years.

4.     The person who discovered the math for using gravity assist to accelerate a spacecraft from planet to planet to planet…was:

a. Aristotle (384 B.C. to 322 B.C)
b.      Galileo (1564-1642)
c. Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)
d.      Katherine Johnson (1918- )
e. Michael Minovitch (1936- )

END OF TEST!
DON’T STOP WORKING.
START TALKING.
ASK QUESTIONS.
GO TO THE LIBRARY TO FIND THE ANSWERS.

In this drawing a spacecraft gets an assist from Jupiter as it "slingshots" toward Saturn. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 used gravity assist to fly by the outer planets. Image courtesy of NASA

The twin Voyagers have no people on board on their interstellar journey, but carry The Golden Record, which contains messages, music, and pictures from Earth. Image courtesy of NASA/Alexandra Siy

In case you didn't make it to the library: In 1961, UCLA graduate student Michael Minovitch used math and the new IBM 7090-7094 computers to invent gravity assist trajectories for space flight. Used with permission of Michael Minovitch

Alexandra Siy's Voyager's Greatest Hits tells the story of the twin space probes that traveled to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, a journey beyond our solar system into interstellar space, where no probe has ventured before. Siy tells the fascinating story of how the Voyager probes work, where the probes have been and what they’ve seen, and what they carry on board.

Alexandra Siy is also a member of Authors on Call. You can bring her to your classroom via interactive videoconferencing and learn more from her and ask her questions. To find out more go here.

MLA 8 Citation
Siy, Alexandra. "Spaced Out." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 2 May 2018,
www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/Spaced-Out.

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Music That's Out of This World

3/18/2022

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Amy Nathan
Stories that Surprise and Inspire

When musicians play a lively tune, they often find themselves spontaneously tapping their toes and moving about to the pulsing beat. But when Ellen Ochoa played her flute at work one day in 1993, she couldn’t be spontaneous at all. If she hadn’t made careful plans, she could have been blown about the room, just by playing one long note on her flute. That’s because she was an astronaut working on the U.S. Space Shuttle as it circled Earth more than a hundred miles out in space.

      Gravity is so weak far out in space that astronauts—and any of their gear that isn’t fastened down—will float about inside a space craft. Blowing air into her flute could have created enough force to actually send Ochoa zipping about the space shuttle cabin. So, to keep herself in place as she played, she had to slip her feet into strong loops attached to the floor.

      Dr. Ochoa, now the director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, was the first U.S. astronaut to bring a flute on a space mission, but she wasn’t the first to make music in space. Nearly thirty years earlier, in December 1965, two astronauts onboard the Gemini 6 space craft played a musical joke on mission control officials down on Earth. Those astronauts—Walter M. Schirra, Jr., and Thomas P. Stafford—told mission control that they saw an unusual object near their spaceship, a satellite perhaps, moving from North to South. They said they would try to pick up some sound from this mysterious object. Then they used the harmonica and bells they had secretly brought with them on that December mission to surprise folks listening down below by playing “Jingle Bells.”

      In recent years, other astronauts have brought musical instruments on space missions to help lift their spirits, especially those who spend many months on the International Space Station. Like Dr. Ochoa, these astronaut musicians have to make adjustments, such as using a bungee cord to attach an electronic piano keyboard to a pianist’s leg.

Some astronauts have composed music in space, including Canadian Chris Hadfield. On May 6, 2013, he sang the song he wrote—called “I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)”—in a live TV broadcast from the space station as thousands of Canadian schoolchildren sang along with him down on Earth. Click here for a recording of that space-to-Earth performance

Dr. Ellen Ochoa playing her flute on board the U.S. Space Shuttle. Courtesy of NASA

Walter M. Schirra, Jr. Courtesy of NASA

Thomas P. Stafford. Courtesy of NASA

Chris Haddfield. Courtesy of NASA

Learning to play an instrument can be fun and, at times, frustrating. Amy Nathan's lively book helps young people cope with the difficulties involved in learning a new instrument and remaining dedicated to playing and practicing. Teens from renowned music programs - including the Juilliard School's Pre-College Program and Boston University's Tanglewood Institute - join pro musicians in offering practical answers to questions from what instrument to play to where the musical road may lead. For more information, click here.

MLA 8 Citation
Nathan, Amy. "Music That's Out of This World." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think
Tank, 11 May 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/
Music-Thats-Out-of-This-World.

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If the Earth Were a Button

1/27/2022

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David M. Schwartz
The amazing, engaging, math exponent

Imagine Earth as a button. I don’t mean you’re going to sew it onto your shirt. But imagine the planet Earth shrunk to the size of a button. (Of course Earth is not flat like a button but we’re giving our shrunken Earth the same diameter as a shirt button.)

Go ahead and draw a circle around a shirt button. Call it “Earth.” Suppose you wanted to draw Jupiter, the largest planet, at the same scale as this micro-Earth. That means you’re going to shrink it to the same fraction of its original size as our button-Earth. What size would little Jupiter be?

One way to find out would be to calculate how many times bigger the real Jupiter is than the real Earth. Earth’s diameter is about 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers). Jupiter’s is about 88,000 miles (143,000 km). Divide the size of Jupiter by the size of Earth to see that Jupiter is about 11 times bigger.

So, since Jupiter’s diameter is 11 times that of Earth’s, put 11 buttons in a line to show the diameter of Jupiter. Then draw the circle that represents Jupiter. If you don’t have 11 buttons, just look at the picture. Did you think the Earth was a big place? Look at it compared with Jupiter!

     But what about the sun? The sun’s diameter is about 865,000 miles (1,400,000 km). That means it’s almost 10 times bigger than Jupiter. Can you find a way to draw a circle 10 times the size of our Jupiter? We’ve drawn part of it for you, on the same scale as our button-sized Earth. On the picture, it’s labeled “our arc.” (An arc is part of a circle.) Looking at the arc, you can imagine the rest of the circle and compare the sun to Jupiter and Earth. A minute ago, you thought Jupiter was big. Now it looks shrimpy compared to the sun!

      But is the sun really gigantic? Do some research to find out the size of a red giant star like the strangely named Betelguese (pronounced “beetle-juice.”) Figure out what it looks like compared to our sun, which is a medium-sized star. You may be amazed at the difference. And you thought the sun was big!

      Is anything truly big? Is anything truly small? Or does that depend on what it’s being compared to?

If the Earth were the size of a button, Jupiter’s diameter would equal eleven buttons because the diameter of Jupiter is eleven times that of Earth.

Both images are by Marissa Moss, the illustrator of David M Schwartz's book, G is for Googol.

Extend “our arc” to complete the circle and you’ll see what the sun would look like if the Earth were the size of a button. (An arc is part of a circle.)

G is for Googol: A Math Alphabet Book is a wonder-filled romp through the world of mathematics.
For more information, click here.
David Schwartz is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more.

MLA Citation
Schwartz, David M. "If the Earth Were a Button." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think
Tank, 16 Jan. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/
If-the-Earth-Were-a-Button.

0 Comments

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Every Day is Earth Day

What Is a Light Year?

Spaced Out

Music That's Out of This World

If the Earth Were a Button

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