Recently in Space Science we completed a project on a star that was assigned to us. Sarah and I had the Sun, which is a main sequence star. Main sequence stars are middle-aged, and use nuclear fusion in their cores to fuse Hydrogen to Helium, creating the pressure necessary to maintain the star. Stars spend 90% of their lives as main sequence stars. Main Sequence stars start as nebulae, clouds of dust and gas, and gradually contract to become protostars. The protostar also contracts and turns into the main sequence star, like the sun. Someday in billions of years, the Sun will run out of its fuel and expand into a red giant. Red giants are large, cool, bright stars.
We also learned that a star's mass can help determine the future of the star. For example, a massive red giant will most likely end up as a black hole, while a large red giant will probably turn into a white dwarf or neutron star. In addition to learning more about our star type, we also learned about certain ways to classify stars: the Hertz-Russell Diagram for the luminosity and temperature of a star, and the Star-gas-Star cycle to categorize stars by the stage of gas recycling they are in. We put our information onto a Glog, an online poster, and presented them to the class.
What Did I Enjoy About This Project?
My favorite part of this project was definitely learning how different stars are classified in the Star-Gas-Star cycle and Hertz-Russell diagram. We already knew a lot about stellar evolution, so learning about a way to classify all stars by certain things such as temperature and luminosity was really interesting. I also loved getting to pick our own groups!What Didn't I Enjoy?
My least favorite part of the project was the fact that I was assigned a relatively "boring" star. The Sun is a star that everyone has learned about before, so I didn't have much new or cool information about it to present. I really strongly didn't enjoy Glogster, mainly because anything slow bothers me, but also because we had to save so frequently in order to save our Glog. Overall, I didn't think it was a very user-friendly site.What Would I Change?
To make this project better, I would probably consider changing the examples for each type of star, perhaps to a certain star that could be further researched for its place in a constellation or its neighboring stars. Also, because every group had to research the HR diagram, the Star-gas-Star cycle, and the Light Year, there was a LOT of repetitive information in the presentations and many redundancies in the handouts.
