Day 6: Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Post date: Jul 16, 2013 7:18:20 PM

Essential Questions:

1) What does the life of a star look like?

2) What factors influence a star's life?

3) What constitutes a strong Little Big History project?

We took a quiz on gravity and fusion. Then, we talked more about stars. Stars appearing in our universe signify our second Threshold in Big History.

Here is a website explaining the HR Diagram. You can read up on that website and follow the links. You can take this quick quiz to see if you know how to read the axes of the diagram. Or you can go through this activity explaining some of the finer details of the diagram. Finally, here is an animation of the change of luminosity and temperature of a star. Here is a video explaining the birth of stars, and here is another video explaining the life and death of stars. Here is a summary of the Life Cycle of Stars. And here is an image capturing that life cycle in a flow chart.

We watched the Unit 3 lecture entitled "What Stars Gave Us" (Video: Part 1, Part 2). In the death of massive stars, supernovae explode the heaviest naturally occurring elements in our Universe, signifying our third Threshold of Big History. Here is a summary of the chemical abundances in our Universe. We finished star talk with a class quiz on the HR Diagram.

We then transitioned into talking in groups about our Little Big History topics.

For HW, due Wednesday, please read and annotate the following, in order is best, keeping in mind how things got more complex or where more complex things were created. These four texts will form the majority of your seminar texts for seminar this week.

1. Stokes Brown, Big History, p. 1-15
2. Christian, Maps of Time, p. 54-75
3. Taylor, "The Solar System: An Environment For Life?", Science, 2005
4. Kerr, "Alien Planetary System Looks a Lot like Ours," 2008

There will also be a podcast for the seminar this week as well as the HR Diagram. You will get these materials and the seminar questions on Wednesday.

Also for HW:

• Little Big History narrowing topic graphic organizer due at the end of class Thursday.

Lastly, here are Little Big History documents:

• The assignment document, detailing steps and due dates
• The initial topic graphic organizer
• The narrowing topic graphic organizer: due at the end of class on Thursday
• An initial list of possible text sources you can use for the project if you're feeling stuck
• Here is the Little Big History rubric for 2013, off of which you will be assessed.