Is there life in space?

One of the questions that get asked most often when it comes to space is, 'Does life in space exist?' The thing is, that it is hard to believe that there is no life in space. Due to the fact that there are so many different planets in the galaxy alone, there has to be at least one or two other planets that support life like Earth does. Astronomers have only scratched the surface when it comes to exploring other planets in space.

The people who study different stars and look for different planets haven't even discovered a fraction of the stars that are in the universe. In 2016 scientist have discovered around 2000 of the billions of planets in the galaxy. But we're not just limited to the Milky Way, there are trillions of other galaxies in the universe, each one could possibly harbor a planet that is able to support life like our home, the Earth. The process of finding planets is also getting quicker as time goes on, any day could be the day when we find like in outer space.

There are a lot of requirements for a planet to be deemed habitable for life. One of the biggest requirements is that the planet needs to be big enough, so it has its own atmosphere. Another requirement is that the planet is in the habitable zone, meaning it isn't too close or far from the sun. The reason why this is, is because of water. If a planet with water is too close to the sun, all the water will evaporate away, and if the planet is too far from the sun, all of the water will freeze over. Even with requirements like these to be met for a planet to be habitable, space is so large that there must be other planets that can support life. It might take a while, but scientists will eventually find another planet that can support life.

Stars

Heliocentric solar system By: RuM

Summary: If one were to look up into the night sky, they would notice something, the stars. In the vastness of space, there are these big balls of fire that shine so brightly you can be can see them from trillions of miles away. The thing is these stars are doing something that most people wouldn't imagine when thinking about stars. That thing is nuclear fusion, this is when stars use a little bit of energy to fuse 4 hydrogen atoms, into one helium atom. This is why stars shine, because of all the energy being used to do this over and over again.

SP2: Developing and using models
Due to the fact that space is so big, we had to rely on models quite a bit to help us understand the importance of various things in space, such as stars. We made a small model of the solar system that was about 5 feet in length, which is much shorter than the millions of miles that our solar system covers. We used the paper to gauge the relative distance of all of the planets to each other, including the Sun and the Kuiper belt, which were both at the edge of the solar system.

XCC: Scale, Proportion, and Quantity

When talking about space, one has to acknowledge how vast it really is, the Earth may seem to be a big place for some, but just looking at our solar system, one can see how Earth is really just a speck in the entirety of space. The sun is one million times larger than the Earth, and it is no where near the biggest star in the galaxy. It takes light, the thing that can almost travel instantly 4 years to get to the nearest star to our solar system.

Seasons

Axial Tilt of Earth By: GregorDS

Summary: Throughout the year, seasons come and go, but depending on where a person lives, the time of the year seasons start and end changes. This is due to the tilt of the Earth causing different parts of the earth to get different amounts of sunlight. The Earth has a tilt of 23.5 degrees and depending on where the Earth is relative to the sun, each hemisphere might be in a different season than one another. If the Earth is tilted in a way that the northern hemisphere gets more sun, then it is spring or summer there, and vice-versa.

SP2: Developing and using models
We used various online models to represent how the Earth's tilt affects when and where each season occurs in a year. We also used physical models to help give us a better understanding on what season it is based off of how much sunlight is hitting each part of the Earth at a certain point in time. This also helped us better understand the relationship between sunlight, the poles and the equator.

XCC: Scale, Proportion, and Quantity
When looking at things on an astronomical scale can be quite weird, because things so large that can barely be described by our units of measurement can fit right in the palm of someones hand. This doesn't just go for physical objects, things like years can pass in a matter of seconds. There are also problems with scaling down things that are that big, because you have to get the scale factor just right so the model wont be incorrect.   

Digital vs. Analog | Writing Across Curriculums

Digital vs. Analog technology W.A.C

As technology continues to further evolve, we become able to do things that we weren’t able to before and enhance the experience of things like entertainment. Unlike analog graphing, digital graph will not only get better in the future, it is already better and easier to use than analog is. Digital technology is already easier to use than that of analog, not only is it less expensive, it’s also more widely available, and anyone can do it. Editing can fix all of the issues that people may have with digital technology and make the music sound better than it did before. Lastly, as time moves on the technology will continue to improve and get better, surpassing analog technology by even more than it does now. By far, digital technology is much easier to come across today than analog technology, not only that digital is much easier to use than analog is.

While analog technology has been around for ages, since man has started to make music, in the short time that it has existed digital technology has already become much more available and easy to use than analog technology is. Rather than having a confusing instruction manual like analog technology does, digital technology has easy to navigate, use, and understand help pages that anyone can use if their confused. So learning how to use digital technology won't be an issue if the company uses digital. Not only that, but the ability to find a piece of analog technology today is much harder than the ability to find a piece of digital technology, and much less expensive as well so almost anyone can find and buy all the necessary equipment, so money wont be as much of an issue as it was before. Through the power of editing we can put in all of the subtleties that may have been missed in the recording and sampling of music being played, holding it to a higher sound quality and precision that analog technology has.

With advanced editing tools that are widely available and easy to use, digital sound can have all of the subtle parts of the music that may have been missed during sampling, meaning that digital technology can have the same level of sound quality as digital has. Using separate recordings, and control over the level of volume a noise has, editors can put in all of the subtle pieces of music that may be present throughout the piece, is it’s skipped over during sampling, meaning that digital can have the same level of music integrity that analog has. Not only that but editing is a much faster and less scary process than before, because there is an undo button if something is accidentally deleted, it doesn’t have to be recorded again, which would cost the company time and money. Meaning that our company would be saving money if we switched to digital. Digital technology has a lot of great points about it, does analog technology have any kind of advantage over digital technology in this debate?

While digital has a large amount of upper hands on analog, it gets beat out in one aspect of sound, and that is all of the smaller harder to notice sounds in music, which are subtle noises that make the song all that much more enjoyable than if they weren’t there. When people use digital technology, it doesn’t convert the entire song onto the computer, only parts at a sampling rate, which can leave out parts of the song that would make it much more enjoyable than it was before. While songs made using analog technology always picks up the entire song, so when digital technology is used all of the subtle yet really enjoyable parts of the song are left out, which can lose a lot of money for the company producing the technology and music for people to enjoy. Even though lots of enjoyable parts of the song are left in the initial recording, they can still be recorded and added in later via editing, which means people can enjoy all of the parts of the song as if they were listening to it on a vinyl record.

As time passes on digital technology will continue to keep improving and it will keep getting better and better, meaning that not only will it become even more accessible to people, it will also have a lot more uses than it would today. Every day, people around the world are working to make more and better technology, meaning that technology has almost a 100% chance of being improved in one way shape or form, this includes music technology meaning that digital technology will continue to surpass analog technology every day. The technology used for making music can be improved in lots of different ways, like the sampling rate may continue to increase meaning that people will eventually be able to hear all of the subtleties in the music from the initial recording, which reduces the amount of work that needs to be done. There are lots of ways that digital technology is superior to analog technology, and there are lots of areas that digital technology will be better than analog technology in the future.

Not only is digital technology better than analog technology right now, it will also continue to be better than analog technology in the future. Meaning that it will continue to improve and get better for anyone to use. Digital technology is much easier to use than analog technology with all of the guides and help pages, it’s also much more available these days as compared to analog technology. Almost all of the problems that digital technology and recording has can be fixed by recording more audio and editing the audio that was already there before. As time moves on digital technology will continue to improve and get even better than before, continuing to surpass analog technology. As you can see digital technology is far superior than analog technology, and while both have their good sides, digital beats out analog in almost every way shape or form, meaning that digital is the overall better option than analog.

Electromagnetic spectrum

EM spectrumvised By: Philip Ronan, Gringer

Summary: The electromagnetic spectrum is where all light in the universe falls into, things like radio waves, and gamma rays are some examples of what falls on the spectrum. Even though we can't see most of the light on the electromagnetic spectrum, we have found ways to measure it, both analog and digital, so that we can visualize it to better study all of the different types of light. Only one part of the spectrum can be seen by the human eye, this is called the visible spectrum, which includes all of the colors of the rainbow, and is its own spectrum.

SP4: Analyzing and interpreting data
We took a look at a single graph that was incredibly smooth, and had to plot out ten points that all fell on whole numbers, we then repeated the process but we had to plot out 20 points and they could be whole or fall on half numbers. We observed that as the more points were added to the graph, it not only got smoother, but it also got more accurate to the original graph that we were basing it off of, which shows how accurate results can be given by human hand. 

XCC: Patterns
On the electromagnetic spectrum you can see that the shorter the wavelengths get not only do the waves get warmer and warmer, the frequency also increases. The smaller the frequency is the warmer the color it is represented by is, with one noticeable change of color right where the visible spectrum is, this also correlates to the warmer the wave is at its max power, than the cooler the color its represented by on the spectrum. Meaning that the smallest thing on the spectrum, gamma rays, would have a very light purple representing its frequency and a temperature of about 10,000,000 K.

Musical Instrument Project

 

Image Link

Summary: Various different types of waves can affect the world in different ways. Like how sound waves can make things audible to the human ear, or how seismic waves can make the ground shake greatly. Even though you can't see them, this applies to electromagnetic waves as well, like how a UV ray can cause a person to get a sunburn, or how X-rays allow us to see inside of our own bodies. Almost, if not all waves can effect the world or the things on it in various ways.


Backward-Looking
In school I personally learned about sounds and waves beforehand, but did not know as much on the topic as I would have liked, meaning that I learned a lot about the topic by working on the project. Specifically things like: the different ways to measure the wavelength and amplitude of different kinds of waves. I gained a lot of knowledge by working on the project.

Inward-Looking
The thing I like the most about this project is the fact that it is flowing with creativity, showing how my team and I can take a task as simple as creating an instrument and making something incredible out of it. The one thing I dislike about the project is that some of the decorations on the instrument itself are lack luster, specifically the 'ears' on the side of the instrument look really bad and poorly done.

Outward-Looking
If I were to give this project a grade I would give it a A, because the project can play any note at a variety of pitches, and not to mention it doesn't take any real skill to play, along with its uniqueness. We made and incredibly interesting design for our instrument, and decided to go with a design that was simple but also really cool. While some parts of the instrument don't look that good, it mostly does as all of the other pieces of the instrument are cool references.

Forward-Looking
The one goal I would like to set for next time is:

When designing a unique solution to a problem, and my team and I hit a roadblock, than rather than doing a small and boring fix, we make it so that the solution fits into the project really well. I say that this is my goal because in our project we came to the roadblock of the sound not being very audible. So we came up with a quick fix to our problem, which was cutting holes in the side. I wish we came up with a greater solution next time.

Sound

Audio Database By: Aarkentechnologies 

Summary: Sound is a mechanical wave that allows us to hear various noises. Sound is a longitudinal wave meaning instead of going up and down, it compresses, and decompresses. Sound is also a type of energy, meaning that it can be used to manipulate matter, different sounds exist because of the fact that they manipulate the air around it. The frequency of the wave is directly related to the pitch of the sound, meaning that the louder the sound, the larger the frequency.

SP5: Using mathematics and computational thinking
We had to use various different types of math to find out about different properties of a wave. We had to do various measurements on things like the distances between two troughs, and the distance from a trough to the top of the wave. We used these measurements to figure out things about the wave, like its frequency, its wavelength, and the amplitude of the waves we measured.

Energy and Matter
Sound relates to energy and matter, because sound itself is a form of energy, you can use sound and the vibrations that it creates to manipulate matter. Matter is also related to sound because it is a mechanical wave, meaning that it cannot exist without matter, because it has to travel through matter to exist, specifically travelling through matter in the form of vibrations.