Fostering prospective teacher-students to contextualize blackbody radiation in astrophysics

Abstract

Abstract In astrophysical concepts, a star can be treated as a blackbody. However, teaching blackbody radiation in physics classrooms is not often relevant to astrophysical contexts. Therefore, prospective teacher-students need to have experiences contextualizing blackbody radiation in astrophysics. This study aimed to investigate how the inquiry lesson activities for teaching blackbody radiation in an astrophysics context, including the design of a simple experimental setup and the worksheets. The experimental setup was designed using affordable equipment like a tungsten bulb, a basic meter, a small piece of compact disk, and a smartphone application called lux meter. By manipulating the voltage across the tungsten filament and measuring the current and intensity using a lux meter, students can calculate its temperature, analyze the spectrum through PHET simulation, and construct a graph of wavelength vs intensity. The method of this study combines a qualitative analysis to describe the resulted spectral by the apparatus, lesson design, and description of the implementation. In addition, quantitative analysis using a quasi-experimental one-group pre-test and post-test design was conducted with prospective teacher-student participants who had taken the astronomy course and are still taking the modern physics course. The results show that inquiry lesson using simple apparatus model and materials positively fosters prospective teacher-students understanding of how to contextualize the blackbody radiation concept in astrophysics.