Learning resource
Looking for a habitable exoplanet
Students learn about the transit method for finding planets and they use Kepler's 3rd law to determine whether the exoplanet Kepler-22b is habitable.
Learning resource
Landing on a Comet
In this activity students look at the relationship between mass and weight on the Earth and on a comet.
Learning resource
Kepler’s 3rd Law
A classroom activity in which students explore the relationship between the distances of planets from the stars they orbit and their orbital periods.
Learning resource
Journey times to alien worlds
A classroom activity where students use distance, speed and time and light-years to calculate the time of travel to exoplanets.
Learning resource
Human Sundial
An outdoor experiment in which students observe, record, and explain why their shadows change throughout the day.
Learning resource
Hubble's Law
Students look at the relationship between velocity and distance of a galaxy and what that means for the Universe. Accompanies the video 'How big is the Universe'.
Learning resource
How do we See Things?
In this practical activity, students investigate the effect of light on the size of the pupils in our eyes and learn about how we see objects that give off their own light and those that don’t. Accompanies the video ‘Seeing The Invisible’.
Learning resource
How do we know how old the Sun is?
ROG astronomer Brendan explains how we determine the age of our Solar System from space rocks and how we can work out how long the Sun has left before it engulfs the inner planets.
Learning resource
How big is the Universe?
Royal Observatory astronomer Liz shows us the expanding nature of the Universe and how this affects the light reaching us from distant galaxies, some of which will remain forever hidden from our view.
Learning resource
Galaxy Statistics
A classifying and plotting activity based on the Citizen Science project Galaxy Zoo which explores issues of sample size and personal bias as well as the distribution of galaxy types in the Universe.