Teacher Resources for Instructional Planning


HS, Astronomy Std 25: Describe objects found outside the solar system.

Lesson Plans: A Classical & Relativistic Trip to a Black Hole: Students will apply motion calculations involving distance, velocity, acceleration and time; apply the concept of density to manipulate quantities of mass, volume and density; and apply calculations of universal gravitation including tidal effects in the intense gravitational field of a black hole. Make a Star Finder Make a Star Finder. Learn your way around the night sky by finding some of the constellations. The pattern for your Star Finder is included as an Adobe Acrobat file. Gravity Is As Gravity Does Gravity, whether it is holding you to the Earth’s surface or swallowing light in a black hole, is the same force obeying the same laws at all places in the observable Universe. We can measure it with this simple lab. Make a Comet Nucleus It's fun, it's a mess, and it's one of the most memorable and scientifically accurate demonstrations in astronomy! A Journey of Discovery with RXTE In this unit (5 days long using a 90-minute block schedule), students, who take on the role of light curve experts at a fictitious Drew Freeman Research Facility, receive an important bulletin from NASA. A mysterious X-ray source near the Galactic Center has been detected by the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite. The students collect, graph, and analyze data gathered by one of this satellite's scientific instruments, the All-Sky Monitor (ASM), to determine whether or not this source can be accurately identified as a black hole or a neutron star. Timing an X-Ray Pulsar Using XTE observations of the Crab Pulsar, the student will be able to: Determine the period of the light intensity. Interpret this period as the period of rotation of the object. Identify this object as a neutron star. Eclipsing Binary Using data of the object Hercules X-1 taken by the All Sky Monitor aboard RXTE, the student will be able to: Identify this object as a binary source. Determine an approximate value for the orbital period of the object. Asteroid Orbits To graph the locations of the Earth and asteroid orbits, and to estimate when an asteroid would cross the Earth's orbit.

Resources: The Web Nebulae: If you look up at the night sky with your naked eye all you see is a black void with a few points of white light. But with a camera and a telescope an entirely different view unfolds in brilliant color and amazing detail. The pages that follow introduce a few of these spectacular objects. The Physics Classroom Tutorials, animations, sample problems Aeronautics Related Activities, Experiments, and Lesson Plans
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