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[BLOCK 6]
MST_CREATOR
Table of Contents
Note From Author ................................................................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
Earth & The Solar System.......................................................................................................................................... 3
Motion of The Earth ................................................................................................................................................ 3
Day & Night Cycle ................................................................................................................................................. 3
Rising & Setting of The Sun.............................................................................................................................. 3
The Seasons ........................................................................................................................................................... 3
Motion of The Moon ................................................................................................................................................. 5
Phases....................................................................................................................................................................... 5
Rising & Setting .................................................................................................................................................... 5
Orbital Speed ............................................................................................................................................................. 6
The Solar System ..................................................................................................................................................... 6
Asteroids................................................................................................................................................................. 7
Comets ..................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Elliptical Orbits..................................................................................................................................................... 7
Origin ............................................................................................................................................................................ 8
How They Formed................................................................................................................................................. 8
Planet Gravitational Field Strength .................................................................................................................... 9
Travel Times ............................................................................................................................................................... 9
Planetary Data...........................................................................................................................................................11
Stars & The Universe ................................................................................................................................................. 12
The Sun as a Star ................................................................................................................................................... 12
Nuclear Reactions in Stars .............................................................................................................................. 12
Stars ........................................................................................................................................................................... 12
Light Years ........................................................................................................................................................... 12
Galaxies.................................................................................................................................................................. 13
The Life Cycle of a Star .................................................................................................................................. 13
The Universe ............................................................................................................................................................ 14
The Milky Way (Again)...................................................................................................................................... 14
The Expanding Universe ................................................................................................................................... 14
Microwave Background Radiation .................................................................................................................. 15
Hubble’s Law......................................................................................................................................................... 15
Earth & The Solar System
The earth makes a revolution every 24 hours, this means that in one half of the time (12
hours), it is daytime and in the other half, it is night-time.
The Seasons
There are 2 factors that cause seasons, one being the fact that it takes the earth around
365 days to complete an orbit around the sun and the other is the tilt of the Earth on its
axis (23.5) ﹾ.
Figure 1
March 20th
Night & Day Have Same Length Night & Day Have Same Length
A & E And
(Equinox) (Equinox)
September 23rd
Motion of The Moon
Phases
The moon completes an orbit around the sun in a month.
As the moon rotates around the earth, it appears differently to us, this means that the
moon has phases.
Figure 2
The shaded parts are the parts which we don’t see as the sun light does not
go onto them.
Average orbital speed is the speed of an object that is orbits around a body.
They are smaller, solid, rocky, They are large, colder, have
have a layered structure, and low densities, and are mainly
have high densities. made up of gases.
Asteroid Belt This is a belt of asteroids going around the sun, it can be found
between Mars & Jupiter.
Moons These are the moons that orbit the planets in the solar system.
(Like IO, Europa, Phobos, etc)
Minor Planets These are dwarf planets (like Pluto or Ceres) and certain asteroids
from the asteroid belt.
Smaller Bodies Like comets (i.e., Halley’s Comet) & other small bodies.
Asteroids
An asteroid is any object that orbits a star and does not have a large enough mass for
gravitational attraction to pull it into spherical shape.
Comets
Comets are objects that consist of a nucleus of ice and dust.
When comets are near the sun, they develop a bright head and long tail that points away
from the sun.
Elliptical Orbits
Elliptical orbit basically refers to the path an object orbits around another object:
Figure 3 Figure 4
As you saw in both figures, the sun was inside the elliptical orbit, but not in the middle,
the reason for this is that the sun is never in the middle of an elliptical orbit unless the
orbit is perfectly circular.
In Figure 4, we can see that the elliptical orbit of a comet is in an oval shape, it shows us
that the speed of the comet increases as it approaches the sun and decreases as it moves
away, energy is conserved as the kinetic energy the comet had when near the sun is
converted to potential energy.
Origin
How They Formed
Formation
Sun Formed when gravitational attraction pulled clouds of Hydrogen gas and dust.
First, the matter that was left after creating the sun formed an accretion disk,
Planets
gravitation attraction eventually pulled the matter together to form planets.
Planet Formation
Planets Group Inner Outer
Position Between Sun & Asteroid Belt After Asteroid Belt
Properties Dense Low Density
Small Large
Rocky Mainly Made of Gases
Layered Structure Cold
Property Since these planets were in the
Reasoning As the sun grew, it became hotter. colder region, far from the sun.
Since there was a low number of heavy Since most of the leftover matter
elements, this resulted with the inner was the light elements, this resulted
planets being small, rocky, and solid. with the outer planets being large and
gaseous.
Gravitational Field Strength acting on an object decreases as the distance between the
object and the planet increases.
Distance Between Object & Gravitational Field Strength
Planet
Increase Decrease
Decrease Increase
𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝐵𝑒𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑂𝑏𝑗𝑒𝑐𝑡 & 𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑡
𝐺𝑟𝑎𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙 𝐹𝑖𝑒𝑙𝑑 𝑆𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑔𝑡ℎ
Travel Times
To calculate the amount of time light takes to travel through space, we can use:
𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒
𝑆𝑝𝑒𝑒𝑑 =
𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒
Note:
Figure 5
Remember that these reactions can only occur in stars that are stable and have a hot and
dense enough core to carry out the fusion reactions.
How It Glows
Some of the energy that is generated at the core is transferred to the outer layers of
the star.
The outer layers are cooler and not as dense as the core but still allow the Hydrogen gas
to glow and emit EM radiation into space.
Stars
Light Years
One light year is the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in one year.
Galaxies also consist of clouds of gas (mostly Hydrogen & dust) and they many rotate in
spiral disks
Unlike the sun, other stars are located light years away from the Earth.
The Universe
The Milky Way (Again)
The milky way galaxy is one of the many galaxies in the universe.
The diameter of the milky way is 100,000 light years and is made up of more than 800
billion stars.
Another thing to note is that the greater the distance between the observer and the
star, the more the redshift.
Redshift supports the fact that the universe is expanding & the big bang theory.
The Big Bang Theory
The theory suggests that all the matter of the universe was packed in a dense state, it
tells us that an explosion took place (the big bang) around 14 billion years ago.
As the universe has expanded over the years, this caused the CMBR to redshift into the
microwave region of the EM spectrum.
Hubble’s Law
This law states that:
“The velocity of the galaxy which is also known as the redshift is directly
proportional to its distance.” (Source: Byjus)
Formula:
𝑣 = 𝐻0 × 𝑑
Quantity Description How To Find It
Current Estimate of H0
The current estimate for H0 is 2.2 x 10-18 per second.
1
𝑎𝑔𝑒 =
𝐻0
This means that the age would be around 4.5 x 1017 seconds.
We can simplify this value into years by dividing by 31,536,000 giving us: