The Sun Inquiry Lab

Middle School Inquiry Lab on the Sun

In this lab students will make a scale model of stars in the Milky Way.

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 the Sun’s location and size compare to other stars in the Milky Way?

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.

Materials List:

• metersticks or measuring tape
• star comparison page
• 2 m strip of paper (at least 20 cm wide)

PROCEDURE:

For this lab, students will create their own scale model of our Sun in comparison with the distances of other major stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Using the data sheet supplied, with distance and star information, students will position each star and list at least two facts about the star from the information sheet and two more facts from their own research.

Having to come up with a scaled distance on their own, students will have to decide how many centimeters will equal one light-year. This information will assist students in correctly charting the distance of our Sun to the others in our galaxy.

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 questions:

1. Why do astronomers use light-years to measure distances in space?
2. Compare and contrast the Sun with another star in the Milky Way.
3. Besides stars, what else do you think is in our galaxy?

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: 8.8B – Recognize that the Sun is a medium-sized star located in the spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy and that the Sun is many thousands of times closer to Earth than any other star.