The Planets of our Solar System

Our astronomy science unit continues with study of the planets. We used the mnemonic phrase "My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nachos" to help us remember each planets name.

Mercury, a terrestrial planet, is the first planet in our solar system. There's not much known, but what astronomers do know, is that it's quite hot (750*)during the day and because it doesn't have an atmosphere, it becomes freezing cold (-300*) at night. It's the smallest planet in our system and it's quite dry and dusty--much like our moon. Mercury has many craters on its surface due to asteroids crashing into it. To help the kids better understand craters, we made some craters in a bowl of flour. Of course they got a little carried away, but that was part of the fun! Hopefully it'll help them remember a few of the characteristic that are known about this planet.

Our next stop on our trip through the solar system was Venus.....a very, very hot planet (about 870 degrees). This terrestrial planet--which means 'earth-like', in that it has a rocky or earthy surface, you can stand on it--it stays hot all the time because it does have an atmosphere to keep all the warmth close to the surface.
It has many volcanoes that spew lava onto its surface. We experimented with melted butter, acting as lava, and poured it over our rocky, floury surface. We watched how the 'lava' cut little streams out of the flour, going where it wanted to go. After a while, observed how the butter hardened up again, and it was no longer liquid, changing to a hardened rock, just as real lava does after it comes our of a volcano and sits for a while.
I had the older kids give oral reports on two planets, one terrestrial and one gaseous, Cailin gave hers on this one.

We skipped earth, as we are pretty familiar with this planet, and moved on to Mars. Although there's much known about this planet, we didn't spend to much time reading on this one, because Connor gave his oral report on this one. We did have fun re-creating the biggest mountain peak in the entire solar system....which happens to be on Mars. It's a volcano called Olympus Mons. Ours isn't very big, but we did make it EXPLODE!

Liam loved this part!!

A future scholar at work.

The Asteroid Belt comes next in the solar system and once we cross over it, we came to Jupiter, the first gas giant in our system. It is made of gases, not rocks. There are many storms on this planet. One in particular is called the 'Giant Red Spot'. This storm has been observed to be raging over this planet for more than 300 years. (Astronomers have seen it in their telescopes since at least 1665). It has many moons and it's incredible mass or size has a strong gravitational pull. This pull is so strong that most comets and asteroids from space are sucked up in it's gravitational pull, hitting Jupiter, instead of our earth. Some people call it a "protective Mother to earth" because of this trait. God created it's massive size and gravity pull to keep our earth safe from asteroids and the such.

The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is like a hurricane on earth. We made a hurricane in a bottle to see an example of what this might be like on Jupiter. They all took turns making hurricane-shaped funnels and were quite mesmerised with this project. Hopefully it'll remind them that Jupiter is a stormy planet.

Saturn is next, it's the most famous of the planets, it even has a day of the week named after it....Saturday. It's easy to remember this one because of it's bright rings. Saturn is a lot like Jupiter. They are both made of hydrogen and helium gas. It too, is horribly cold and stormy.

Beyond the two enormous yellowish-gold planets of Jupiter and Saturn are two enormous blue gas giants --Uranus and Neptune. These two planets have a great deal of methane in their atmosphere, which absorbs red light and reflects blue light, thus it gives these planets it's beautiful blue color.

These gaseous planets are also stormy (Neptune has a Great Dark Spot, much like Jupiter's Red Spot. However, through the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers see that it's gone, although another storm has formed on a different part of Neptune.)
Cailin did her oral report on Neptune and Uranus. She was thrilled to find that the names of some of the moons that orbit around Uranus are named after characters in Shakespeare play 'A Midsummer's Night Dream', in which she knew about them because of the play she was in during summer. It's fun to watch my kids have 'ahaa' moments in learning.

We made clouds to better help us understand about their atmosphere. The inner core of each planet is very hot, while the gases that make up its atmosphere are extremely cold. Gases rise from the hot core, but when they get cooled off in the icy-cold atmosphere, they turn into liquids and then solids (like ice crystals), making clouds. These clouds aren't made of water, but methane and other chemicals, however, the process is similar to what we created in our jar.

Letting the 'clouds' escape.

A few years back, when we studied the solar system for the first time, we made ice cream, to exemplify the cold nature of these planets. It was such fun then, we decided to do it again.

It's sooooo cold....with the rock salt added to the ice it brings the freezing point of the water down to 28 degrees instead of 32. Brrrr that's cold to hold. The kids brought out their gloves and scarves to protect their hands.

The delicious concoction is completely ready to eat. Mmmmmm, delicious....well okay, much of the salt from the ice seaped into the the bag and made the ice cream a bit salty, but they enjoyed it anyway.