Intergalactic Education Revisited

Teachers often select young students to be the sun and planets. The student sun stands in the middle while the teacher helps students playing (and maybe dressed as) Mercury, Venus, Earth,  Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune walk in elliptical orbits around the sun. A moon also can be chosen to walk around Earth. Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, students can play roles as rocks in the asteroid belt that some scientists think might be the remains of a planet that exploded in the solar system. (And, of course, there is the fear that one of the large rocks from the asteroid belt might hit Earth and destroy life here.) There is much more to the universe.

    Sometime later in a student's education a teacher, or shows with Carl Sagan or someone like him, may mention Earth is part of a solar system located on one side of the Milky Way galaxy, which is filled with other planets and billions of stars in fixed positions. Like our sun, some stars have two or more planets that might sustain extraterrestrial life. Some stars are brighter than others and some have different colors depending if they are dying or just developing. The universe is filled with a spectrum of light not visible with the naked eye.

     The Milky Way is not the only galaxy in the universe; the Andromeda galaxy is the biggest one closest to the Milky Way. At some places on Earth that are free of man-made lights, it's possible to see the stars in the Milky Way and the entire Andromeda galaxy spiral. A black hole that sucks up light seems to be located near the center of galaxies where it might hold galaxies together like the sun's gravity attracts the planets. When galaxies crash into each other, they seem to send ripples throughout the universe.

    Beyond their solar system, students have much to research about the universe and many ways to demonstrate what they have learned. Perhaps a Milky Way of students dressed as different colored stars could surround student stars holding a large black garbage bag representing a black hole. The rotating solar system students would be positioned on one side among the stars. Classrooms could even act as separate galaxies, bump into each other in the hall, and set off a kind of wave like that performed by spectators at a ball game.

   

   

Life on Jupiter's Moons?

Instead of globalization, should we be thinking about solarization, life in the solar system? A NASA photo just showed us 3 Jupiter Galilean moons: Io, Europa and Ganymede. They all are named for Greek myths.You might have guessed that they are called Galilean moons, because Galileo discovered them. But you need to do some research to find out if Jupiter has any more Galilean moons or any more moons at all.

     Of the three Galilean moons in NASA's photograph, Io is the closest to Jupiter and Ganymede is the farthest away. What does gravity have to do with these different distances? What else might influence these distances?

     You'll also have to do some research to find out if any of these moons could support life and what kind of life it would be. Knowing how far Jupiter and these moons are from the sun, we might think any life would have to be able to survive in very cold temperatures. But these moons have other interesting elements to consider. Io has 400 active volcanoes. Europa has shifting plate tectonics similar to those on Earth. Photos also show it has "water plumes" that signal the possibility of vast oceans under its surface. Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, is larger than Earth's moon, and it is the only moon with a magnetic field similar to Earth's.

     All in all, there's an interesting science project waiting here.