Orders of Magnitude

“How wide is the Milky Way Galaxy?” “How small is a carbon atom?” Such questions may sound simple, but their answers are virtually impossible to comprehend since nothing in our realm of experience approximates either of these measures. To grasp the magnitude of such dimensions is perhaps impossible, but it is relatively easy to express such dimensions by scaling up or down (expressing them in orders of magnitude greater or smaller) from things with whose dimensions we are familiar. An order of magnitude is the number of powers of ten contained in the number and gives a shorthand way to describe scale. An understanding of scale allows us to organize our thinking and experience in terms of size, and gives us a sense of dimension within the universe. Collaborate to represent powers of ten by including photos of the following in this (blank backup file) Examples 1, 2, 3

NGSS Standards

• CCC-3 Scale, proportion, quantity

Estimates & Scales

• Estimates and scales

Orders of Magnitude

• Scale in the Universe

Comparisons of size and scale

• Levels of Organization in Biology

• Cell size and scale

• Comparison of planet and star sizes

• If the Moon were a Pixel

Activities

• Create a Powers of Ten SlideShow (Sourcebook)

• Activity 8.2 Order of Magnitude: The Universe in Powers of Ten (with text) (Sourcebook)

• Powers of Ten Grid (Sourcebook)

• Table 8.5 - List of objects to illustrate order of magnitude (Sourcebook)

Diagrams 8.2 | 8.3 | 8.4 | 8.5 (scaleable pdf graphics). Table 8.5