Science Homework Help

Now that we know all about orbits, we are going to learn how the Kepler mission was able to detect thousands of exoplanets – planets orbiting other stars – just by observing the tiny but periodic drop in brightness when a planet passes in front of it (known as a transit).

Lab Activity: 

This week’s lab is an online activity brought to you by PBS Learning Media

1. Click on this link or copy/paste it into a new browser window (Chrome or Firefox browser works best):  https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/buac18-912-sci-ess-transitexoplanets-il/analyzing-light-curves-of-transiting-exoplanets/ (Links to an external site.)

2. Click Launch in the middle of the window showing an orange star. You will be asked if you want to Sign In, or Continue as Guest. You can sign in with Google, Facebook, or an email address – and this will allow you to come back to your saved work. OR you can “Continue as Guest” – and your work will be saved just for that session.

3. Read the material and play the movie on Page 1, then move to the next page using the green button, under the blue banner near the TOP of the page.

4. Page 2 asks you to answer a question (near the bottom of the page), then hit Save. Near the top of the page on the left (below the blue banner) you will see a folder symbol marked My Work – that is where your responses will be saved as you proceed through this activity. 

Banner at top of page, showing Page number, and My Work folder.

5. Complete all 8 pages, including the interactive orbit plotter on page 8. You can go back and change or expand on your answers to earlier pages.

6. Once you have completed the activity, click on My Work, and you will see your saved responses. Now click Print, and you can either print the work summary to a printer, or (depending on your computer’s print options), save it directly to a PDF for upload to Canvas. (Another option in some print dialogues is to Save to Google Docs – you can then create and download a PDF from there.)

Submission: as is our custom, each one of you will have to go through this lab individually. Each group will then submit a combined pdf document containing both the collective work and all of its members’ individual labs.

If you have any questions let me know. Thanks,