FisAstEE project

FisAstEE is a Portuguese Science Outreach project related to Physics and Astronomy activities with the target group the parents of children in primary schools.

The project can be found in Facebook, and in the Website.

#fisastee

Rosetta's Grand Finalle

Rosetta is going to finish its mission by crashing into comet 67P.
Read more here: http://esea.ea.gr/blog/follow-rosettas-grand-finale

And learn more about this mission here: http://bbc.in/29oDVpP

Inside Gaia's camera

https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=9lgeRsaQcIk

Zooming in on Star Cluster Terzan 5

Published on Sep 18, 2016

Credit: Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org)/DSS/Hubble/NASA
Music: Johan B. Monell

Details: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160921.html

Engage your students in this new school year

If you want to engage your students in Physics and Astronomy (thinking in space careers), you can use this two videos to do so.

This one is a little portion of the movie Superman: Man of Steel. Jor-El is presented to the Krypton's council to talk about how Krypton's resources is ended and the planet is going to die. He is appealing to reach to the stars again, like the ancients did it before.

This second video is a promotion of the ESA Rosetta mission. We started a new space adventure...



Happy school year.

Escape Velocity

In physics, escape velocity is the minimum speed needed for an object to "break free" from the gravitational attraction of a massive body. More particularly, escape velocity is the velocity (speed traveled away from the starting point) at which the sum of an object's kinetic energy and its gravitational potential energy is equal to zero. At escape velocity the object will move away forever from the massive body, without additional acceleration applied to the object. As the object moves away from the massive body, the object will continually slow and asymptotically approach zero speed as the object's distance approaches infinity.

For a spherically symmetric massive body such as a (non-rotating) star or planet, the escape velocity at a given distance is calculated by the formula

where G is the universal gravitational constant (G = 6.67×10⁻¹¹ m³ kg⁻¹ s⁻²), M the mass of the body to be escaped, and r the distance from the center of mass of the mass M to the object. Notice that the relation is independent of the mass of the object escaping the mass body M. Conversely, a body that falls under the force of gravitational attraction of mass M from infinity, starting with zero velocity, will strike the mass with a velocity equal to its escape velocity.

In this equation atmospheric friction (air drag) is not taken into account.

Source: Wikipedia

In hyperPhysics website you can input some data and it gives the escape velocity: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vesc.html

See the escape velocity of Earth and Mars here: http://bit.ly/1iThICI

full computaion here http://wolfr.am/7ijFlEcl

Listen about escaping probes in this Astronomy Cast:

Ep. 384: Escaping Probes by Astronomy Cast on Mixcloud

Eratosthenes experiment

Source: wikipedia

On Wednesday, at local noon, each school in different countries will conduct the Eratosthenes experiment.

Eratosthenes  of  Cyrene (276 aC – 195/194 aC) was a Greek mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. He invented the discipline of Geography, including the terminology used today. He is best known for being the first person to calculate the circumference of the Earth, which he did by applying a measuring system using stadia, a standard unit of measure during that time period. His calculation was remarkably accurate. He was also the first to calculate the tilt of the Earth's axis (again with remarkable accuracy).

To conduct the experiment and exchange data with other schools please go to this website: eratosthenes.ea.gr

You can also participate in the photo contest.

Be part of the Galileo Teacher Program (connecting teachers in all countries).

Scale Solar System

How the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Worked (Infographic)

How the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Worked (Infographic)
Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

Chasing Comets

This is the first Inspiring Science Education Hangouts conducted by Dr. Pamela Gay:



This is part one of two. See the second part here: https://plus.google.com/events/coli5l...

"The solar system is littered with Ice. The bulk of this material orbits quietly in the outer Solar System, but sometimes, something disturbs the ice and the come plunging in toward the Sun. In this Hangout, we will discuss comets, how we explore them, and how they brought water to worlds like Earth."

The educational scenario can be found here: http://portal.opendiscoveryspace.eu/community/chasing-comets-774702?msg_id=23134

Andromeda's Galaxy

After a whole year of work (really hard this one), now is time to rest and relax.

So, yesterday I went with some friends to Serra do Alvão, Vila Real (Portugal), and we started to watch the night sky and some astronomical objects with telescopes.

I don't have a telescope. So, I took some pictures and, for the first time, I captured Andromeda's Galaxy.

The result is three pictures combined as one.

Have a nice summer time.

Astronomy Education Alliance Meeting 2014

The Astronomy Education Alliance Meeting will take place in Cascais, Portugal between 8 and 12 September 2014, and co-hosted by the European Planetary Science Congress and Global Hands-on Universe. This meeting will showcase and discuss the latest innovative efforts in astronomy education, allowing teachers, educators and outreach professionals to combine efforts and focus astronomy resource production on cross cultural curricula utilizing formal education best practices.

For more information and registration go here: http://handsonuniverse.org/astroeducation/

Astronomy Education Alliance Meeting

A message from my friend Rosa Doran:

"Book these dates in your callendar:

September 1st to 5th - GTTP international training

September 8th to 12th - GHOU2014 / Astronomy Education Alliance Meeting

This year our anual meeting (Global Hands-on Universe 2014) will take place in Portugal. This time the meeting is in partnership with some major events. The event will take place in parallel with the Europlanet Science Congress 2014 and in the framework of a major Astronomy Education event: The Astronomy Education Alliance Meeting. The aim is to set the stage to discuss the latest innovative efforts in astronomy education, allowing teachers, educators and outreach professionals to combine efforts and focus astronomy resource production on cross cultural curricula utilizing formal education best practices. 

You can find all information regarding the meeting here: http://handsonuniverse.org/astroeducation/

As already is our tradition we will be hosting during the week before this major event, the GTTP international training. There are special conditions for people willing to attend this training session. All the information can be found here: http://gttp.ea.gr

We hope that you will join us in this event. We promise this will be an unforgetable experience in sunny Portugal. Some nice surprises are here waiting for you. Please join and spread the word."

I hope you can join us :)

Cosmos Calendar

Do you want the COSMOS Calendar?

You can foun it in astroPT website and download it in pdf or png :)

How Big is the Solar System?

The image of the Solar System was made using real images of the planets. It is not to scale; the Solar System is so large with respect to the size of the planets, that to fit it on the screen, the planets would have to be small dots. Thus, some artistic license is involved. However, the planets are in the correct order. Also shown is comet Hale-Bopp, photographed by the author.

One way to help visualize the relative distances in the solar system is to imagine a model in which the solar system is reduced in size by a factor of a billion (10⁹). The Earth is then about 1.3 cm in diameter (the size of a grape). The Moon orbits about a foot away. The Sun is 1.5 meters in diameter (about the height of a man) and 150 meters (about a city block) from the Earth. Jupiter is 15 cm in diameter (the size of a large grapefruit) and 5 blocks away from the Sun. Saturn (the size of an orange) is 10 blocks away; Uranus and Neptune (lemons) are 20 and 30 blocks away. A human on this scale is the size of an atom; the nearest star would be over 40,000 km away!

Read more: http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/cosmic/solar_system_info.html

While you are talking and introducing the idea of the model, it may be helpful (depending on the age of the audience) to build up on a blackboard something like this:

    real   in model  
Earth's width   8,000 miles  8/100 inch
Sun's width   800,000 miles  8 inches
therefore scale is  100,000 miles  1 inch
therefore   3,600,000 miles  36 inches or 1 yard
and Sun-Earth distance  93,000,000 miles 26 yards

Read more: http://www.noao.edu/education/peppercorn/pcmain.html

Mercury is only 0.39 astronomical units from the Sun, while Jupiter orbits at a distance of 5.5 astronomical units. And Pluto is way out there at 39.2 astronomical units.

That’s the equivalent of 5.9 billion kilometers.

If you could drive your car at highway speeds, from the Sun all the way out to Pluto, it would take you more than 6,000 years to complete the trip.




Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/104486/how-big-is-our-solar-system/#ixzz2wAOQhPOD

You can watch and download an infographic here: http://ripetungi.com/the-size-of-the-universe/

Galileo's Birthday

Today we celebrate Galileo's birthday (14 February 1564).

His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, and the observation and analysis of sunspots.

Galileo made original contributions to the science of motion by showing a remarkably modern appreciation for the proper relationship between mathematics, theoretical physics, and experimental physics. 

A biography by Galileo's pupil Vincenzo Viviani stated that Galileo had dropped balls of the same material, but different masses, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was independent of their mass.Galileo proposed that a falling body would fall with a uniform acceleration, as long as the resistance of the medium through which it was falling remained negligible, or in the limiting case of its falling through a vacuum. He also derived the correct kinematical law for the distance travelled during a uniform acceleration starting from rest—namely, that it is proportional to the square of the elapsed time ( d ∝ t ² ). Prior to Galileo, Nicole Oresme, in the 14th century, had derived the times-squared law for uniformly accelerated change, and Domingo de Soto had suggested in the 16th century that bodies falling through a homogeneous medium would be uniformly accelerated. Galileo expressed the time-squared law using geometrical constructions and mathematically precise words, adhering to the standards of the day. (It remained for others to re-express the law in algebraic terms).

He also concluded that objects retain their velocity unless a force—often friction—acts upon them, refuting the generally accepted Aristotelian hypothesis that objects "naturally" slow down and stop unless a force acts upon them. Galileo was the first to express it mathematically, verify it experimentally, and introduce the idea of frictional force, the key breakthrough in validating the concept. Galileo's Principle of Inertia stated: "A body moving on a level surface will continue in the same direction at constant speed unless disturbed." This principle was incorporated into Newton's laws of motion (first law). (adapted from Wikipedia)

More info: 
http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/gal_accn96.htm
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/history/galileo.html

Where Did Earth's Water Come From?

Know more about planet Jupiter

Now, a journey to Jupiter:

Jupiter’s most recognisable feature is the Great Red Storm – This is a storm that has been raging for at least 350 years and is large enough for two Earths to fit inside of.

Jupiter’s larger moon Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system – It’s has a diameter of 5,268 km making it larger than the planet Mercury.

Jupiter had two rings – These are thought to be composed of material from it’s moons where they have been struck by meteorites.

in http://space-facts.com/jupiter/

This is a video with James L. Green Director, Planetary Science Division, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, about what can we learn from studying Jupiter and its moons:

In Universe Today you can find 10 interesting facts about Jupiter:
1. Jupiter is massive.
2. Jupiter can't ever become a star.
3. Jupiter is the fastest spinning planet in the Solar System.
and more...

Dark energy interacting with dark matter

Notes on dark energy interacting with dark matter and unparticle in loop quantum cosmology

Mubasher Jamil, D. Momeni, Muneer A. Rashid

(Submitted on 8 Jul 2011 (v1), last revised 29 Jul 2011 (this version, v2))

We investigate the behavior of dark energy interacting with dark matter and unparticle in the framework of loop quantum cosmology. In four toy models, we study the interaction between the cosmic components by choosing different coupling functions representing the interaction. We found that there are only two attractor solutions namely dark energy dominated and dark matter dominated Universe. The other two models are unstable, as they predict either a dark energy filled Universe or one completely devoid of it.

Notes on dark energy interacting with dark matter and unparticle in loop quantum cosmology. (arXiv:1107.1558v1 [physics.gen-ph])

Reviewing events in 2013

Credit: Space.com