Unpacked Content
Scientific and Engineering Practices
Engaging in Argument from Evidence
Crosscutting Concepts
Stability and Change
Knowledge
Students know:
- The stars' light spectra and brightness may be used to identify compositional elements of stars, their movements, and their distances from Earth.
- Energy cannot be created or destroyed-only moved between one place and another place.
Skills
Students are able to:
- Develop a claim based on valid and reliable evidence obtained from a variety of sources.
- Identify and describe evidence supporting the claim.
- Use examples to construct oral and/or written logical arguments.
Understanding
Students understand that:
- A scientific theory is a substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world. Based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment and the science community validates each theory before it is accepted.
- If new evidence is discovered that the theory does not accommodate, the theory is generally modified in light of this new evidence.
- The universe is a vast single system in which basic laws are consistent.
Vocabulary
- electromagnetic spectrum
- spectral lines
- emission spectra
- absorption spectra
- redshift
- blueshift
- Hubble's Law
- scientific theory
- evidence
- cosmology
- hot Big Bang
- Steady State
- cosmic microwave background radiation
- Big Bang nucleosynthesis
- dark matter
- dark energy
