Yr 10 Revision Guide
Click below for guide
Archive for the Year 10 category
Life Cycle of Stars
The Sun
Some stats about our nearest star:
- 150 million km from Earth
- light takes 8½ minutes to travel from Sun to Earth
- surface temperature about 6000oC
- core temperature about 15,000,000oC
- main process is fusion of hydrogen nuclei to helium nuclei
- estimated age of our sun is 5 billion years
- estimated lifespan is 10 billion years
- radiation from the sun includes a range of wavelengths from the entire electromagnet spectrum including cosmic rays
Life cycle slideshow
A Flash animation of star life cycles can be found here.
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram
This is a plot of absolute magnitude (actual brightness) of a star against the surface temperature of the star. When data from a number of known stars is plotted it shows the main sequence clearly as a cluster as well as separate clsuters for dwarf stars and giants.
To find out more on this topic you need to study astrophysics (click here for Astrophysics made simple)
10 Yearly revision
download this doc
See Board of Studies (BOS) for past papers – you can download past papers here
The Night Sky
Now is a good time to be looking at the night sky, especially if you are in Year 10 as that is what you are studying in Science lessons. If you go to the Sydney Observatory website you can download the October night sky map, as well as a Podcast that tells you what to look for. Some obvious constellations that are visible are Scorpius (directly overhead) and the Southern Cross (funnily enough located towards the south). Jupiter and Venus are both visible this month. If you download the map you can use it to navigate the night sky. If you do this at home you should already have an idea of where north, south, east and west are – if not use a compass or ask your parents!
To get the moon phases for this month try the weather website.