Ninety Three Million Miles from the Earth

For the next 6 weeks for science we are spending time learning about astronomy. This week we read books and watched a video about our sun. The only star in our solar system and it's 93 million miles from earth.

The video--a Bill Nye, the Science Guy-- gave us a great idea for a project to do.

We pulled out 3 white bowls and filled them with water. We then added food coloring to two of the water bowls.


We placed them outside--one was covered with a dish to create an atmosphere--we left them there. After a few hours we checked to see if there was a temperature change.

Indeed, there was. The water that was clear was cool. The darker uncovered water was warmer and the colored water that was covered with the glass dish was quite warm.
This experiment was to show how powerful and strong the sun's rays were. It was interesting to me that we did this on a cool and cloudy day. We wanted to see if the old adage about getting a sun burn, even on a cloudy day, could be correct. We all agree, we believe it could happen.

We've also spent some time memorizing the different parts of the sun: core, corona, convective zone, sun spots, solar flares, photosphere, radiative zone.