Abstract
The realization and experiences with a physical exoplanet model in the education and outreach are described. During the tests with students in the classroom and adults at public demonstrations, the following conclusions were drawn: in the visualization it is effective to connect and install together the models of planets inside and outside the Solar System, where hot Jupiter’s easily fit into the orbit of Mercury. The size of planets and orbital distance could be more effectively visualized with this method, using the Solar System as a context. The exoplanet model helps to expand the imagination of the audience on how does a planetary system look like, what is getting important as diverse views of explanatory systems emerging in recent years. This inexpensive model is useful in the education and outreach above all to make the audience more familiar with the parameters of exoplanets (here sizes, distances and partly masses), and it gives new input also for those persons who regularly read papers and news on exoplanets.
Highlights
The aim of this work is to present a method and experiences using it, to visualize exoplanets in the classroom and in a summer camp in order to popularize astrobiology
We selected the exoplanets to visualize in 2008, before the relatively large number of smaller exoplanets discovered by Kepler
Around 2008 and 2009 most of the known exoplanets were Jupiter sized with some Neptune class object, but substantially fewer than it is known during the compilation of this paper at the beginning of 2013
Summary
The aim of this work is to present a method and experiences using it, to visualize exoplanets in the classroom and in a summer camp in order to popularize astrobiology. We describe the basic idea behind the visualization, some important details of the realization, and our experiences to draw a conclusion on the affectivity of such method This project is the continuation of our work in the education of astrobiology related topics both in the secondary schools and at university level in Hungary [1,2,3,4]. Being an important and popular subtopic of astrobiology, exoplanets often appear in the popularization related issues [9,10,11] and in the education This hot topic is in the focus, only images were used to visualize the size of these bodies, and the methods often lacks the visualization of distances proportional to the real stellar and planet sizes. We describe a simple homemade plastic model of exoplanets that was tested with students and adult audience both as part of the education and as a public outreach activity
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