What is Astronomy? Astronomy is the study of the sun, moon, stars, planets, comets, gas, galaxies,dust and other non-Earthly bodies. Astronomy is very important to understanding space and everything in it. When studying Astronomy it is very important to use models. Models are important because it makes it possible to study, for example the distance and sizes of the planets without having to go through all the trouble of going up into space, which is very far away and cost lots of money.
In our science class we were not able to go to outer space to study the planets, so we made models. We made two different models, Distance models , and size models. For our distance model the scale was 1 cm for every 12,000,000 km, and for our size model it was 1 cm= 8,045.7 km.
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In our size model the sun was 173 cm. The biggest planet was jupiter with 14.47 cm represented by a pen, and our smallest planet (dwarf planet) was pluto 0.28 cm represented by half a sprinkle. 188,757 pluto's can fit in jupiter and 250 million plutos could fit in the sun. Using this model we can also find out that venus and earth are the closest in size out of all the planets. This model helps show how much smaller the planets are then the sun, and the difference in size between the different planets.
The distance model we used in class helps understand how far apart the planets are from each other. Some things I learned from the distance model were that Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are within 169,890,00 km from each other, whereas Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and neptune are within 3,721,760,000 km from each other. Another observation I made was that Mercury is 77 times further from the sun than Neptune, and that the distance from Saturn to the Sun is twice as far as the distance from Jupiter to the