Transcript What Controls Climate?

…..many things….
….but what do you think is most important?
Can you recognize this x-ray image?
How about this ultraviolet (UV) one?
This one is infrared………………
Using satellites to take pictures using
parts of the electromagnetic spectrum
besides visible light helps us learn more
about everyone’s favorite star…
“Sol”
Our sun is a star…
 http://www.teachersdomain.org/resource/ess05.sci.es
s.eiu.sunbasics/
 Why does the sun look different from the stars we see at
night?
 What is the sun made of again?
 What about planets and moons?
One hot “Sol”
 The sun has many different layers, each of which is a
different temperature. After energy is created through
nuclear fusion, at the center of the sun, it slowly
comes to the surface, and then goes into space.
 http://youtu.be/qmCJMWp_ggk
Far Out
 Because Earth’s orbit is an ellipse (or oval) it is actually five
million kilometers closer to the sun during January than in
July.
 The change in Earth’s distance from the sun doesn’t affect
temperature on our planet much because we are so far away
from the sun.
Far out…
 Five million kilometers is longer than driving around the
Earth 100 times, but it is still very small compared to our
total distance from the sun…
 If we could drive to the sun,
it would be like driving
around the entire Earth
almost 40,000 times, which
would take longer than a
lifetime (if it was possible..)
Bigger than it looks
But still the little kid on the block in the solar system..
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS88G5WBcfQ
What does “Sol” do for us?
 Heat and light: Energy from the
sun arrives at Earth in many
different wavelengths that heat the
earth, but the light we see is just
visible light.
 Gravity: Our solar system has been
around for about 4.5 billion years,
and it’s the pull of Sol that has been
keeping it together all that time, like
a magnet
Even Sol needs a little help sometimes
 It takes more than just heat to keep our planet warm
 Earth’s atmosphere (the particles in the air above
Earth) traps some of the heat under it like a blanket.
 Just like a blanket, this keeps
the dark part of Earth that
is not facing the sun warm.
 This “greenhouse effect”
is one of the things
that makes it possible
for life to exist here.
Out of this world?
Other planets couldn’t support the type of life we have on Earth
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Temperature
Water
respiration (breathing)
photosynthesis (how plants breathe)
solid land
 Do you think they could support other types of life?
 This picture is of the type of bacteria that live in peoples’ intestines.
Some scientists think that if there is life on other planets, it would
probably be bacterial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqFVxWfVtoo