Question

The passage below describes two friends creating a physical model of the solar system. read the passage and then answer the questions below. ashley and tina are creating a model showing the distances between earth, the moon, and the sun. they choose a blue ball to represent earth, a gray ball to represent the moon, and a yellow ball to represent the sun. ashley and tina take the balls to the middle of a large field at their school. they know that earth is about 240 thousand miles from the moon and about 93 million miles from the sun. in their model, they choose to represent one million miles with one step. click the blue words to correct the following statements.

Answer 1

Ashley and Tina are creating a scale model of the distances between Earth, the Moon, and the Sun using steps to represent millions of miles. However, practical educational analogies use a scale factor of 1 billion to reduce the vast distances to manageable dimensions. These models and experiments help conceptualize the solar system's spatial relationships and celestial motions.

Step-by-step explanation:

Creating a Scale Model of the Solar System

Ashley and Tina are working on a scale model of the solar system, which is a common practice in astronomy education to help students understand vast distances. Using common objects such as balls of different colors to represent celestial bodies, the goal is to mimic the distances between Earth, the Moon, and the Sun in a tangible way. Given the immense distances involved, scale models allow for a better grasp of spatial relationships within our solar system.

The actual distance from Earth to the Moon is about 240 thousand miles, whereas from Earth to the Sun, it is about 93 million miles. If Ashley and Tina represent one million miles with one step, they would take approximately 240 steps to separate the Earth ball from the Moon ball and around 93,000 steps for the distance from the Earth ball to the Sun ball. Given the large numbers, however, in practice, they may need to adopt a different scale, such as the one described in various educational materials where 1 billion (109) is used as a scale factor, significantly reducing the model size.

Other analogies, like using your own head to represent Earth and an object like an orange for the Moon in front of a bright light to simulate the Sun, can help one visualize the phases of the Moon. These experiments can be very useful for understanding both the relative sizes and distances of planetary bodies and their motions in relation to each other.