Middle School Inquiry Lab on Solar System Gravity
In this lab students will model the inertia and gravity affecting a planet in the solar system to understand why planets stay in orbit.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- How does gravity affect the motion of the solar system?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
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Materials List:
- marble
- 1 ball, either lacrosse ball, baseball, or softball
- piece of fabric at least 2′ by 2′ (can be larger)
- red and green colored pencils
PROCEDURE:
This lab starts off by having students place a marble and large ball eight to 10 inches apart on a flat surface. Students will push the marble and record the path the marble takes after the push.
Then students test Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves in space and time. Students place the large ball and marble on a piece of fabric. Having enough students to lift the fabric, students will lift the fabric by the corners, pulling tight enough to only allow the large ball to cause a dip in the center of the fabric. Rolling the marble across the fabric while in the air, students will once again observe and record the path the marble takes.
CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING:
At this point in the lab, students will be checked for understanding by answering questions about their findings. Here are a few that come with the lab:
- What would happen to Earth if the Sun’s gravity were the only force acting on it?
- What is the effect of these two forces working together?
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following question:
- Thinking about the experiment, would you expect the strength of gravity to get stronger as distance increased, or to get weaker as distance increased? Why?
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
TEKS: 6.11B – Understand that gravity is the force that governs the motion of our solar system.
