Getting+Serious+about+the+Sun


 * Science Cafe: Getting Serious About the Sun**

On November 3rd, I visited the Teen Science Cafe to hear a lecture by Dr. Patrick Treuthardt, a journey into the sun and its produced events interacting with Earth. One characteristic he especially highlighted was the sun's magnetic fields by showing us an example of iron fillings spread out on an aluminum pan and how they react to a magnet. He later dove into the sun's more awe-inspiring abilities, such as creating auroras and solar flares, which are sudden flashes of the Sun's brightness. A real world example he provided during the talk was the Quebec Blackout in 1989, which caused widespread power overload and electronic glitches in satellites. During the activity following his talk, we created sun cookies, in which we decorated cookies with frosting, sprinkles, candy, etc. to show the outer layers of the sun (photosphere, chromosphere, corona).

This presentation relates to environmental science because the sun is the major driving force for life on Earth. It gives energy to plants that provide food and oxygen for all life on Earth, generates the weather, gives us a sense of day and night, creates liquid water, and countless other things. Specifically, it greatly relates back to Chapter 6, in which we learned about biogeography and weather/climate, and also the various chapters in which we covered population dynamics, evolution, and ecology, as the sun provides the necessary things for populations to begin and evolve in the first place.