Author: Lensyl Urbano

Exploring Space: Extrasolar planets

Notice the planet in the lower right corner? (Image from the Hubble Space Telescope via Wikipedia).

One of the neatest developments in recent space exploration has been the accelerating discovery of planets orbiting other stars. Other stars are just so far away that it’s insanely difficult to see anything orbiting them. Also, the stars can be much brighter, a billion times even, than the planets. So, in the beginning, they could just identify the largest of planets, Jupiter sized and bigger, because of they way they make their stars wobble, but this and other techniques have gotten better and better and now we’re looking at smaller and smaller planets, getting down to Earth sized objects.

Methods for detecting planets orbing other stars. Image by M. Perryman.

One of my students, in investigating modern space exploration, found The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, which is pretty sweet because it keeps a running tally of planets found outside our solar system. When he found it last week the number was 502, now it’s 504. The site also has a long list of the ground and space based projects looking for extrasolar planets, which demonstrates how active the field is today.

Letter from a dying explorer

While discussing polar exploration, I mentioned the story of Amundsen and Scott’s race for the south pole. The fascinating blog, Letters of Note, has Scott’s last letter, written bit by bit, on the ice, to his wife back home. It starts, “To: my widow.”

Photograph of Scott's (far left) expedition at the South Pole, on 17 January 1912, the day after they discovered Amundsen had reached the pole first. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

P.S. Letters of Note is a great resource for examples of great letter writing.

God, Glory and GOLD: but why gold?

Gold coin of Kumaragupta I. (Image from Wikimedia Commons).

NPR’s Planet Money has a nice story on why gold is used for money. They take the entire periodic table of elements and eliminate the ones that don’t work because they’re too reactive, a gas, too common, or too toxic. You’re left with five precious metals, rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold, but only one of them has a low enough melting temperature so that it can be worked easily and is not ridiculously rare.

Also, Tony Clayton has a wonderful webpage on Metals Used in Coins and Medals. It has some fascinating details about the history of these metals and their alloys in coinage. For example, “In Old English the Latin word aes was rendered as brass, thus the use of the word brass to mean money still found today, especially in Northern England. “

Pumpkin Chuckin

Photo by <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pumpkin_chucked_from_trebuchet_in_ohio.jpg'>Kevin D. Hartnell</a>.
Photo by Kevin D. Hartnell.

Mr. B’s put me on to the World Championship Punkin Chunkin Association, which has an annual competition. There’s a Discovery Channel program about it too.

Although my head-of-school is not partial to us throwing food around, a trebuchet would make a great project for physical sciences next year (Year B).

Microwave Science

Last year, for an IRP, one of my students did the experiment measuring the speed of light (and the wavelength of the waves) using marshmellows in a microwave. The video above (via Gizmodo) shows the pattern of the microwaves using some neon lights embedded in plastic. The video below, from MythBusters, shows superheated water in action; something I demo every time I make tea-water in the microwave.

Writer’s Resources

MediaBistro has a series of posts for National Novel Writing Month to inspire and assist the serious writer.

Tips and links range from how to start a writing bible, to the correct writing posture. I’m partial to tip on how to turn your computer into a typewriter, although it’s something that’s never worked for me:

The free Q10 program will convert your distracting computer into an old-fashioned typewriter–focused by real typing sounds and disconnected from the Internet.
–Boog (2010) in GalleyCat

Life on Mars

Discover Magazine has a great article summarizing the evidence for life on Mars. It’s long because it goes into a lot of detail examines quite a variety of possibilities, but it ties quite nicely in with the questions we are asking about what is life and where it can be found.

The article also mentions a study titled, “The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems” produced by the National Research Council for NASA. It can be found for free online, with an associated podcast that much more accessible to middle schoolers. The report is extremely open to the possibility that extra-terrestrial life exists, and could exist even without water and might even be silicon based.