Cosmic Collisions

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Key Concepts The universe is dynamic. Everything in the universe changes. All stars, including our Sun, are born, shine for millions to billions of years, run out of fuel, and die. Galaxies can grow by cannibalizing their neighbors. Even the universe itself is evolving: it grew from a tiny, dense fi reball over 13 billion years ago and continues to expand. Collisions in space release enormous amounts of energy. Massive impacts — some as violent as the explosion of 10 thousand billion, billion, billion, billion (10 40 ) atomic bombs — are the natural outcome of the motion of celestial objects. Collisions smash asteroids apart, created our Moon, power the stars, and build giant galaxies. For us, the most important impacts occur when particles smaller than atoms collide and rearrange matter, releasing energy as light and heat. That’s what’s happening by the trillions, every second, inside our Sun — and in other stars as well. Collisions transform. Everywhere in the universe, collisions smash things apart, bring them together, and generally leave planets, stars, and galaxies very different than they were before. Earth is no exception: life has been transformed — maybe even made possible — by collisions. Notably, sixty-fi ve million years ago an Everest-sized asteroid smashed through Earth’s atmosphere, contributing to the extinction of 85% of Earth’s species, including most dinosaurs. Yet this catastrophe gave rise to new ecological niches — including the one humans now occupy. The Aurora Borealis © NASA The cosmic scale of time and space is huge. There’s a reason it’s called space. Our Solar System is billions of miles across: to us a vast and largely empty expanse, but tiny compared to the typical distance between stars. Light from the most distant galaxies can travel for billions of light-years before it reaches us, and a lightyear (the distance that light can travel in a year’s time) is nearly six trillion miles! Time scales are also huge. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Our Solar System, the Sun and the Earth, came into existence 4.5 billion years ago. The ancestors of humans may have walked on Earth 6 million years ago — an immense stretch of time, but less than 0.2% of the age of the universe. And, like the collisions that power the Sun, cosmic events can occur in the blink of an eye. This simulation shows the asteroid collision that changed life on Earth 65 million years ago. © AMNH The laws of physics are the same throughout space and time. Fundamental physical forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism, operate everywhere to keep the universe in constant motion. The same laws that pull a fl y ball down towards the fi eld also pull giant galaxies towards each other. The processes we can observe from our perch on Earth — like the Aurora Borealis, planetary impacts, and galaxies colliding — are happening throughout the universe, just as they have since the Big Bang and always will. The universality of nature’s laws makes it possible to understand things that happened far away and very long ago, and to predict how celestial bodies will move and change in the future. The Earth system has natural defenses. Produced by the rotation of the planet’s liquid outer core, the Earth’s magnetic fi eld shields us from energetic particles in the solar wind that streams off the surface of the Sun at more than a million miles an hour — and which can damage DNA in living organisms. The atmosphere also protects us: most of the tons of rock and dust from space that collide with Earth every day burn up through friction before they hit the ground. We can use knowledge and technology to protect us. Collisions with bigger objects, like comets and asteroids, are extremely rare, but they do happen. However, unlike the dinosaurs, we know why collisions happen and can see what’s coming. Scientists have been mapping the sky in ever-greater detail to track any possible threat while it’s still many years away. Our knowledge — and perhaps our ability to navigate the solar system — could help us protect our planet in the future.
Before Your Visit The following activities are designed to help you and your students make the most of your visit to the Space Show. Elementary and Middle school: Compete in the Moon Olympics: Have students “play sports on the Moon” at http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/explorations/space/ (go to Level One) to learn about the effects of gravity on different worlds. Your place in space: Ask your students where they live. Then ask what they would add to that address if they traveled outside of your city or town, your state, and your country. How about if they traveled into space? Visit http://ology.amnh.org/astronomy/inspace/index.htm to hear a song about our cosmic address. Make your own sundial: Track the motions of the Sun across the sky the way people did in ancient civilizations. Plant a straight stick in the ground and, every hour, place a stone at the top of its shadow. Ask students to fi nd true north (the shortest shadow). Try again in three months and see what’s changed. Two faces of the same force: Demonstrate the interrelationship between electricity and magnetism for your students. They’ll see how to create a magnet using the fl ow of electricity through a wire, and, conversely, how a magnet driven through a coil can drive a current. Download the instructions at http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/activity/l14.pdf. Middle and High school: Cosmic Calendar: Ask students to create a one-year calendar, and to fi t milestones of cosmic evolution onto it, so they can understand the scale of cosmic time. (For example, if the Big Bang occurs at midnight on January 1 st , the Sun is born on June 6 th , and humans don’t arrive until 11:58PM on December 31 st .) A timeline of cosmic events can be found at http:// www.lpi.usra.edu/education/timeline/activity/. Activate an asteroid! Have students visit the Science Explorations: Journey into Space website at http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/explorations/space/ (go to Level Two) to learn how the speed and angle at which an object approaches the Sun determines its fate. How much fuel does the Sun need? Ask students to calculate how many nuclear fusion reactions must occur per second to keep the Sun burning as brightly as it does. How much hydrogen is consumed in the process? http://www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl /web/einsteinguide/activities/sun.html What if there were no Moon? Ask students to break up into teams and research how the Moon affects the Earth. (As an option, they could form three groups, one focusing on the geosphere, one on the atmosphere, and one on the hydrosphere.) After each group has presented its fi ndings to the class, brainstorm about what Earth would be like if there were no Moon. Then, have students compare their theories to what the experts think at http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4786. Explore the link between collisions and extinctions: There have been fi ve major extinctions on Earth: the End Cretaceous (K-T), the End Triassic, the Permian-Triassic, the Late Devonian, and the Ordovician-Silurian. Break your class into fi ve corresponding groups. Ask them to examine the evidence that experts use to determine which extinctions were related to impacts. This program can help you teach the National Science Education Content Standards listed below. Viewing the Cosmic Collisions Space Show will help students gain an understanding of: Elementary School S1b: motions of objects and materials; S1c: light, heat, electricity, and magnetism; S2c: change over time, such as evolution and fossil evidence depicting the great diversity of organisms over geologic history; S3b: objects in the sky; S3c: changes in Earth and sky; Middle School S1b: motions and forces, inertia; S1c: transfer of energy such as transformation of energy as heat; light, mechanical motion; S2e: the evolution and adaptation of living organisms; S3a: the structure of the Earth system; S3c: Earth in the Solar System; High School S1a: the structure of atoms; S1d: motions and forces, gravitational and electrical; magnetism; S1f: interactions of energy and matter; S3a: energy in the Earth system; S3c: origin and evolution of the Earth system; geologic time; evolution of the Solar System; S3d: the origin and evolution of the universe; nuclear reactions. Use this guide and online resources [http://www.amnh.org/resources/ exhibitions/collisions] to plan your visit ahead of time. Give students directions before you arrive, since it can be hard to fi nd space or quiet to communicate with the group. Information about school visits is available at http://www.amnh.org/education/ schools/.
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Cosmic Collisions

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