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- Reaching every student in your General Education class
- Classroom Stories: Teaching Astronomy to Primarily Non-science Students in Group-setting Activities, by Sandi Brenner (Bryant University)
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Category: Reading Astronomy News
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Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls By Stacy Palen Don’t forget to remind your students to watch for the Lyrid Meteor Shower this month. The peak occurs around April 21-22. This meteor shower comes as Earth passes through the debris left behind by Comet Thatcher. Particles lost from the comet continue to drift in the Solar System, gradually…
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By Stacy Palen LIGO has been busy, and a newly released graphic summarizes many of the exciting discoveries the detector has made in concert with Virgo, its European counterpart. Summary: Since 2015, the LIGO/Virgo collaboration has detected gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime caused by rapidly accelerating massive objects—from 10 stellar mass binary black hole mergers and one…
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By Stacy Palen Summary: The Kepler mission, after at least one resurrection, has finally come to an end. During its 9.5 year “lifespan,” Kepler discovered more than 2,500 planets around other stars and changed our minds about how common planets actually are. Article: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/planet-hunting-kepler-space-telescope-dead?fbclid=IwAR0iYMK2_9-tbCgb91JxpFVpLR9MCOgRpC7BxodF69P45Hhtq2_trWv4_4I Questions for Students: 1. Study the graph of Exoplanet Discoveries. The…
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By Stacy Palen. Summary: A red dwarf star in the Milky Way barely contains any heavy elements at all. Its age is estimated at 13.5 billion years. Article: http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/11/red-dwarf-is-one-of-the-oldest-in-the-universe. Questions for Students: 1. Why does the lack of heavy elements imply that the star formed very soon after the Big Bang? Answer: Because since the…
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by Stacy Palen. In September of 2018, Jocelyn Bell Burnell won a $3 million prize in recognition of her outstanding discovery of pulsars. This article presents an opportunity to link science and society while recalling and applying information about radio telescopes, the motion of the sky, and pulsars. Article: https://www.npr.org/2018/09/06/645257118/in-1974-they-gave-the-nobel-to-her-supervisor-now-shes-won-a-3-million-prize Questions for Students: It may…
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by Stacy Palen. Until the result discussed in the article linked below, only two distinct neutrino sources were known: the Sun and Supernova 1987a. Now there is a third: a distant blazar. This article complements material about active galactic nuclei, neutrinos, scientific instrumentation, and the process of science. Following are some questions that I thought…
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by Stacy Palen. Here is a nice little article from NRAO that corresponds to material in Chapter 13 of Understanding Our Universe and Chapter 18 in 21st Century Astronomy: https://public.nrao.edu/news/neutron-stars-fall. Questions for Students: Make a sketch of this triple-star system to show how the three objects move in their orbits as time passes.Answer: A sketch…
Teaching Astronomy by Doing Astronomy 