Space! Part 1

Home course The topic is the space and the solar system.

This weeks session is about how space controls time.

A Place Near The Sun In this lesson we are going to: Understand why space controls our ideas of time in days, seasons and years.

During this session you will see questions in red to think about. The answers are given in separate at the end

Earth Our home is a planet its one of a group of 8 planets.

Can you name any of the others?

We think of Earth as being massive and it is pretty big compared to the size of a human, but it’s a bit like explaining the size of a football field to an ant!

Its actually about 8,000 miles in diameter.

If you walked 10 miles a day how long would that take?

Earth The Earth is not standing still, it is actually moving through space all the time at about 67,000mph.

It is also spinning on its axis. It spins around once every 24 hours, that’s what gives us 24 hours in a day.

Earth The Earth is travelling in an orbit around the sun. The Earth rotates around the sun once every 365 days which gives us a calendar year Earth

Sun

The orbit actually takes 365 and a ¼ days. So every fourth year we add the 4 x ¼ days to give a extra day.

That’s why we have 366 days in a leap year

Earth The Earth’s axis is not vertical but tilted.

We think it got tilted when it collided with another big object billions of years ago This matters because it’s the tilt that causes the different seasons we have in a year

Earth Seasons Look at the picture, with the Sun in the Centre and the Earth going around the Sun. Now imagine you are standing on the North pole. In December you are facing away from the Sun all the time so its dark and very cold. But in June its facing towards the Sun so its always in daylight and warmer.

In December where would you need to be to get most daylight?

Conclusion We get our days because of the planet spinning around, once every 24 hours.

We get our 365 days in a year because that’s how long it takes the Earth to travel once around the sun.

We get our seasons because the planet is tilted so some months we get more daylight as we face the sun.

If you lived on a different planet you would have different ideas of days, seasons and years. If you lived on Mercury a day would actually take more time than a year would. The reason, it spins around the sun faster than it does around itself.

Answers 1, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune 2, 800 days 3, South Pole