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First Years: Lesson Four; *Archived* Ravenclaw and Slytherin: Y29 | S1
Topic Started: Sep 4 2017, 07:42 PM (96 Views)
Michelle Castor
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Astronomy Professor 1-4
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Astronomy,1,4She had a good sleep last night which she hadn't experienced for a long time. She really felt good, like a ton of bricks had just been lifted off her shoulders. She walked over to her desk to organized her stuff for her first year students' lesson, which she was very much looking forward to. She had all her papers ready and was good to go. She sat down at her desk and took a sip of her tea. She sighed and laid back on her chair staring around the room, looking at the posters depicting the stars and planets.

She soon heard a coughing outside the door, she saw her class had already arrived. "Oh sorry guys!" she laughed. [cor=midnightblue]"Okay guys today we are going to look at the sun."[/color] she smiled. She shook her head and took a moment to get her head straight and then she stood up from her desk "The crowning glory and overlay of our solar system are the Sun. For millions of years, it has been worshiped as a god. The giver of life and light. With out it we wouldn't be here to talk about it! It allows plants to grow and along with some other basic elements keeps our planet on track." She stated. "Now, I am going to give you some basic information about the many layers of our sun, so keep some notes, and don't fall asleep." She grinned, picked up a piece of chalk and began to write on the black board.


ABOUT THE SUN
 
The Core: It is incredibly dense, most would think because of its density it would be a solid however it is so hot, 15 million Kelvin's (27 million degrees Fahrenheit) to be exact, the core is in a gaseous state. The core is the 'heart' of our sun. Here fusion reactions produce energy called gamma rays and neutrinos. Gamma rays are photons with a very high energy and frequency. The rays are absorbed and then re-emitted by atoms on their way out of the sun. The core contains 40% of the suns mass in 10% of its volume.

Solar Envelope: It is broken into two areas, the radioactive envelope, and the convective envelope. This layer is not as dense as the core and its temperature is around 4 million Kelvin's or 7 million degrees Fahrenheit. The Envelop puts pressure on the core and maintains the temperature for fusion to take place. The hotter the gas is the more transparent it is, so this area of the sun is more opaque than the core. This causes it to be less efficient for energy to move by radiation and heat builds up in the radioactive area, this is how the convection zone is created. It is huge cells of moving gas several hundred kilometers in diameter.

Photosphere: This is where our sun light is emitted. This area is a layer of low-pressure gasses just outside the envelope. It is only a few hundred kilometers thick and about 6000 degrees Kelvin. You can find out the composition, temperature, and pressure by analyzing the color spectrum of sunlight. A little side fact, helium was discovered by Mr. William Ramsey. He was analyzing the spectrum of sunlight when he found features that were not present in anything on earth. He named it helium after the Greek God of the Sun Helios.

Chromosphere: After the photo sphere the layers of the sun gradually become hotter again. In an eclipse, you can see this layer on occasion as the red circle outside the sun. Its red color is caused by the amount of Hydrogen. The other layers get cooler as they get farther away from the core; however, this layer is 7000k. Temperature increases through the Corona.

Corona: The Corona is the farthest layer of the sun. It is only visible during an eclipse. It is very low density because it is a cloud of plasma with a high transparency, unlike the inner layers. The white Corona is a million times 'less' bright than the inner layers of the sun but many, many times larger. We find this layer to be hotter than the inner layers with a temperature of 1 million degrees Kelvin or 2 million degrees Fahrenheit as an average but some areas can become 3 million degrees, Kelvin.


"Now, the sun has been studied with a great deal by wizard astronomers and a certain witch notably named Elizabeth Willowvale has noticed that solar flares are not what muggles think they are, as they believe they are storms on the sun, and we won't go into that, but they are actual magic projecting itself at Planet Earth, and if we didn't have these solar flares there would be no magic, it's what is keeping magic running, and the amount of energy that goes into this is phenomenal, so never take a muggles view as fact." she laughed.

Moving back to her desk she got another drink of water. "Okay that's it guys for today, once you have copied that down you can go." she smiled. "Oh and don't forget the homework while you're at it." she added. She sat down at her desk and waited for all the students to finish and depart from the classroom, she took out a book and began to read quite intriguingly, almost as if she was consumed by it, which made her remember "We shall be having a trip star gazing on the North Tower next lesson so don't forget your blankets and something warm." she smiled. Once everyone had gone, she left as well and walked down the staircase to the Great Hall to get a bite to eat.

Homework:

-Roleplay the lesson and take some notes.
-Write an essay about the sun
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Stella Wright
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Space girl | SCIENCE! | optimist | dreamer | question everything

Stella was cautiously optimistic when she entered the Astronomy classroom, but by the end of the lesson she was utterly outraged. She was quietly amused by the professor saying they were going to look at the sun; that was never a good idea, but of course she didn't mean it literally. But her very next statement was so utterly wrong that Stella could not take it with equilibrium. The sun had not been worshipped as a god for millions of years. Thousands, yes. But humans hadn't even existed on the planet for millions of years.

The notes were no better. Stella wrote them down diligently, but she was immensely frustrated by the level of inaccuracy by the time she finished. The core of the sun was not gas, but plasma. Even if it was gas, that wouldn't be because of how hot it was; the combination of heat and the immense pressure of such a large body as the sun made it impossible for it to truly be gaseous. And why were these notes using Fahrenheit? Didn't she know they were in new Zealand? No one here used measurements in Fahrenheit, and most of Stella's fellow students wouldn't understand what temperatures in degrees Kelvin meant; she only vaguely did herself. Stella was intrigued by the idea that solar flares were magical, and the origin of magic; that was the only thing Professor Castor had told her so far that she didn't already know, and it was certainly a fascinating idea. But then she had to ruin it with her last smug little comment. "Never take a muggle's view as fact"? That was . . . so unspeakably prejudiced and disgusting and just plain wrong. Stella was appalled that a teacher, of all people, would think it acceptable to say such a thing. Stella didn't say anything; she didn't trust herself to be civil now, so she left the classroom quivering with pent-up rage.


Homework
 
Stella Wright
Ravenclaw First Year
Astronomy Lesson 4

The Sun


The sun is a star, and the centre of our solar system. Our sun is a yellow dwarf, which means that for a star it is relatively small and not particularly hot. At the core of the sun, nuclear fusion reactions fuse Hydrogen atoms into Helium. These elements are gaseous on Earth, but at the centre of the sun the pressure is so great that they instead occur as plasma. Bigger stars are hotter, so they can fuse heavier elements; this is how all the elements up to iron are made. The rest form in supernovae, which occur when very big stars collapse under their own gravity and explode. The sun is too small to go supernova: instead it will expand into a red giant, then as its nuclear energy is used up it will shrink down to a white dwarf.


Sources: X, X, X
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~ Biography ~ Aesthetic ~
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Lucinda Sylvester
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Mysticism | Arrogant | A Good Witch or a Bad Witch?

Lucinda had come to dislike her Astronomy lessons very quickly since the beginning of the year, and once again she entered the classroom with a haughty expression on her face. She had initially been intrigued by the notion of magical astronomy, and though she was sure that there was more to the different moon phases and their effect on a witch's power than the professor had bothered to mention last lesson, Lucinda had decided she'd learn more from a book than she would from this woman. Far from enthused to hear any trivialities about the sun, she placed her chin in one of her hands and resigned herself to a lesson of boredom.

The information the woman wrote on the board annoyed her, however. That all looked like... science. Muggles were the ones who believed in science, and though as a muggle-born Lucinda of course knew that it was a fact of life - what on earth was a witch doing spouting out all these facts? This was a magical school, and should be focused on magical pursuits. The scowl on Lucinda's face was clear, and she didn't bother copying any of the information down. She'd happily fail if this was the direction the class was going to take - science had no place in this world of mystery and mysticism. Instead they should be learning about how astrology affected their everyday lives - something that was surely true all along, despite the majority of muggles believing it was nonsense. A sentiment the professor echoed near the end of the lesson, she was mildly placated to hear. "Well, at least she got that bit right," she muttered, not caring if the people surrounding her heard. "Not about anything that matters, anyway." By the time they were let go, Lucinda was thoroughly over it and shouldered her way past other students without concern as she left.
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Thanks Daph! AESTHETIC | CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT | BIOGRAPHY | RELATIONSHIPS
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