Unpacked Content
Scientific and Engineering Practices
Developing and Using Models
Crosscutting Concepts
Stability and Change
Knowledge
Students know:
- The sun is a star The sun is changing and will burn out eventually.
- Nuclear fusion processes in the center of the sun release energy that reaches Earth as radiation. Hydrogen is the sun's fuel.
- Helium and energy are products of fusion processes in the sun.
Skills
Students are able to:
- Develop models to predict and show relationships among variables between systems and their components in the natural and designed world(s).
Understanding
Students understand that:
- The scale of the energy released by the fusion process is much larger than the scale of the energy released by chemical processes.
Vocabulary
- mass
- temperature
- nuclear fusion
- radiation
- convection
- hydrostatic equilibrium
- flux
- random walk
- red giant
- planetary nebula
- white dwarf
