Year 11 Physics: The Universe
What we know now and how we are striving to know more
- What
- Museum Staff-led
- When
-
Terms 1 to 4, Monday to Friday
3:30pm - Duration
- 60 minutes in the Planetarium
- Year level
- Years 11 to 12
- Minmum student numbers
- Minimum 15 students
- Maximum student numbers
- Maximum 150 students
- Cost
- $9 per student + education service fee
- Booking information
- Bookings 13 11 02
This program supports the astrophysics section of the Year 11 Physics course, Unit 2: How does physics help us to understand the world?
The session runs for one hour and students will have the opportunity to see two complementary ways of visualising the Universe.
The session begins with the new planetarium show, Capturing the Cosmos, which was produced by the Melbourne Planetarium in partnership with academic researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-Sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO).
The show highlights the work being carried out by professional astronomers within Australia. They are using new and innovative telescopes such as SkyMapper in NSW and the Murchison Wide-field Array in WA, to survey large sections of the sky. Generating enormous datasets, astronomers are finding things we’ve never seen before that will help us to better understand the Universe.
Concepts included in the show: The Big Bang Theory, the evolution of the Universe, the structure and expansion of the Universe, the use of Type 1a Supernovae as measuring sticks for distant galaxies, different views of the night sky using various forms of electromagnetic radiation, dark energy.
The session concludes with the students being taken on a journey though the most complete and accurate 3D atlas of the Universe ever made. These datasets, which have need compiled by the American Museum of the Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium with the support from NASA, clearly show the different scales and structures of the Universe.
Victorian Curriculum links
VCE Physics
Unit 2: Area of Study 2
- How do astrophysicists investigate stars and black holes?
- How can we detect possible life beyond Earth’s Solar System?
- How does physics explain the origins of matter?
- How is contemporary physics research being conducted in our region?
Related links
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