LEARNING ACTIVITY SHEET IN PHYSICAL

SCIENCE Radio Waves

Name of Learner: _____ ____
Grade Level: 11_______________________________________________________
Strand/Track: ACADEMIC_______________________________________________
Section: ________________________________________________________
Date: Fourth Quarter 8th Week – Day 1 – 4 (Introduction to Assimilation)____

A. Background Information for Learners

The lesson on speeds and distances provides you with fun and meaningful opportunities for guided and
independent learning.

B. Learning Competency with code

Explain how the speeds and distances of far-off objects are estimated (e.g., Doppler effect and cosmic
distance ladder)

Explain how we know that we live in an expanding universe

C. Directions/ Instructions

While going through this unit, you are expected to:

1. Read and follow each direction carefully.
2. Accomplish each activity for the mastery of competency.
3. Use the Learning Activity Sheets with care.
4. Do not write on any part of the Learning Activity Sheets. Use a separate sheet of paper in answering
the activities.
5. Always aim to get at least 80% of the total number of given items.
6. Contact or see your teacher through messenger, if you have any questions.

D. Exercises / Activities

D.1 INTRODUCTION What I need to Know

While going through this Learning Activity Sheet, you are expected to:
1. Explain on how the speeds and distances of far-off objects are estimated
2. Explain how we know that we live in an expanding universe, which used to be hot and is
approxiamately 14 billion years old.

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 Activity 1: Experiment Time!
Direction: Ask the company of someone (must be an adult) with car or motorcycle.

Materials:
cellphone, someone with a car / motorcycle, wristwatch (preferably digital watch or watch with sounds)

Procedure:
1. Go out on the road with your friend who can drive a car or motorcycle. Take your watch for recording
time.
2. Look for a long, straight road where there are no houses or other cars. Find a place where you can
safely sit or stand on the side of the road.
3. Tell your friend to pass you three times at different speed (e.g., can be once at 20, once at 30, and
once at 40 miles per hour.
4. Ask your friend to blow horn each time as the car or motorcycle passes you.
5. Record on your cellphone the sounds as the car or motorcycle passes.
6. Also make a recording of what the horn sounds like when the car is not moving.
7. Let you friend and drive and pass you without telling you the speed.
8. Make a video of the whole experiment to know what is happening.

Guide questions:
1. How did you find the activity?
2. Can you estimate the speed help you in estimating the speed?

D.2 DEVELOPMENT

Doppler Effect

Progress over the last few generations has meant overcoming some
built-in problems of circular reasoning. Astronomers would like to use
knowledge about brightness to calculate how far away a galaxy is.
They would like to use knowledge about how far away galaxies are to
calculate their typical brightness. They can use distance to calculate
speed, and speed to calculate distance, but not both at once.
Motion sideways across the sky cannot be calculated at all, because
faraway objects move much too slowly to change their position
considerably within human lifetimes. The best an astronomer can do
is to measure speeds directly toward or away from the Earth.
Doppler effect is the apparent difference between the frequency at which sound or light waves leave a source
and that at which they reach an observer, caused by relative motion of the observer and the wave source.
This phenomenon is used in astronomical measurements, in Mossbauer effect studies, and in radar and
modern navigation. It was first described in 1842 by Austrian physicist Christian Doppler. The Doppler effect
tells you only the velocity of the object and not the distance.

How Does Doppler Effect Apply to Galaxies in Space?

Galaxies are also emitters of waves. They are emitters of electromagnetic waves. Light waves travel at a
specific finite speed of 299,792,458 m/s. The source of these light waves is largely the abundant quantities of
hydrogen and helium making up most of the mass of the stars in the galaxies. But there are also many other
elements contributing to the colors emitted. The mix of many colors blends together for an overall white. By
passing the light through a prism, the colors can be separated into a broad spectrum. Interpreting these stellar
spectra is much like looking for fingerprints to identify a person. Notice in the different rows of spectra from a

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variety of stars how there are faint dark vertical lines scattered across each one. These are called absorption
lines.
Here is the important point to make. The stars of the distant galaxy might be moving away from us while the
light is emitted. That will cause the absorption lines to appear at longer wavelengths than if the stars were
stationary. The lines will be shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Red light is of a longer wavelength
than blue light. The enlarged portion of this image shows such a redshift. And, just as with sound waves, the
amount of shift (∆λ) is an indication of the recession speed of the source of waves, the stars in this case.

Cosmic Distance Ladder

Astronomers have identified the most distant quasar yet to be discovered. But how do they know how far
away objects are? These distances are far too vast to be measured directly. Nevertheless, there are several
ways to measure these distances indirectly. The methods often rely more on mathematics than on
technology. The indirect methods control large distances in terms of smaller distances. The smaller distances
are controlled by even smaller distances and so on, until one reaches distances that one can measure
directly. Fortunately, astronomers have a vital tool to help them answer that central question: how far? That
tool is the cosmic distance ladder.

Measurements of the size of the Earth go back in time to at least the ancient Greeks. Eratosthenes
(3rd century BCE) came surprisingly close to determining the radius of the Earth (he was perhaps
one sixth too high). Eratosthenes also invented the concepts of latitude and longitude. Thegreat
Indian mathematician Aryabhata (CE 476 – 550) was a pioneer of mathematical astronomy. He came
within one percent of the current value for the circumference of the Earth.

Triangulation is important in determining distances. Triangulation is the

process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it
from known points at either end of a fixed baseline, rather than measuring
distances to the point directly. This is a useful tool on Earth, especially for
surveying.

1. Direct measurement

Measurement starts locally with the Earth. Once people

had a handle on Earth-sized distances, and they had a
toolkit of standard measuring devices (e.g., the kilometer,
the second, the gram), then they could consider
measuring the sky. To begin with, astronomers needed a
precise determination of the distance between the Earth
and the Sun, which is called the Astronomical Unit (AU)

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Direct distance measurements are only possible for stars within a little more than 1000 light years even with
precision, space-based telescopes. A similar principle can be used to work out the distance to stars, but
accurately and mathematically rather than automatically.

2. Parallax diagram

Parallax is an apparent displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two
different lines of sight. Triangulation is the technique that uses parallax. This technique can be used only for
objects ‘close enough’ (within about 1000 parsecs) to Earth. The distance unit parsec stands for parallax
second; the distance at which the angle subtended by the celestial object is one arcsecond. The first
successful measurement of the distance to a star using this method was carried out by the German
astronomer Friedrich Bassel in 1838, when he determined that 61 Cygni is 10.4 ly away.

a. Trigonometric parallax: By measuring the apparent motion of nearby stars against the background, we
can directly calculate their distances. This technique has been used to measure the distances to many nearby
stars and star clusters out to approximately 100 parsecs from the Earth.

b. Spectroscopic parallax: Using the flux / luminosity / distance relationship, we can calculate the distance
to any star with a known luminosity if we measure its flux on Earth.

3. Standard candles
While parallax is used to calibrate the cosmic distance scale by allowing
us to work out the distances to nearby stars, other methods must be
used for much more distant bodies, since their parallax angle is too small
to measure accurately.

A standard candle is an object that belongs to some class that has a

known brightness (i.e., all members of the class have the same
brightness). By comparing the known luminosity of the latter to its
observed brightness, the distance to the object can be
computed using the inverse square law.

Since how bright a star appears in the sky (its “apparent

magnitude”) is a function of both its actual light output (“absolute
magnitude”) and the distance from the observer, knowing the former
two allows calculation of the latter.

One commonly used type of standard candle is the Cepheid

variable. A type of star named after Delta Cephei in the constellation
Cepheus, in which the luminosity fluctuates over time. Because
there is a direct relationship between that luminosity and the period
over which it oscillates, the absolute magnitude of any Cepheid
variable close enough to see can be worked out.

Cepheids are luminous variable stars that radially pulsate. The strong direct relationship between a Cepheid’s
luminosity and its pulsation period makes them an important standard candle for galactic and extragalactic. To
use them as standard candles, one observes the pulsation period to get the luminosity (absolute magnitude).
By then measuring the apparent brightness (value observed at Earth) one has everything needed to use the
distance modulus m–M.

Binary star systems are very important in astronomy because calculations of their orbits allow the masses of
their component stars to be directly determined, which in turn allows indirect estimates of other stellar
parameters, such as radius and density. This also determines an empirical mass-luminosity relationship from

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which the masses of single stars can be estimated. Binaries can sometimes be used as distance indicators.
Binary stars are often detected optically, in which case they are called visual binaries. These binaries are two
separate stars.

Other formula can also be used to determine absolute magnitude, and therefore distance, such as the Tully-
Fisher relation, which links the luminosity of a spiral galaxy with the range of its rotational velocities, and the
Faber-Jackson relation, from which the luminosity of an elliptical galaxy can be calculated from the dispersion
of velocities of the stars in its center.

4. Redshift
As well as realizing that the Andromeda Galaxy is separate from our own, Hubble discovered that the redshift
of light from other galaxies is proportional to how far away they are – this is now known as Hubble’s law.

The large redshifts of the light from what are now known to be distant galaxies were first noted by the
American astronomer Vesto Slipher in 1912 and are a result of the Doppler Effect. Galaxies further from the
Earth are moving away from it faster than ones close by.

Hubble massively overestimated the rate at which galaxies’ recession velocities increase with distance
because of the error in calibrating those distances that came from confusing the two types of Cepheid
variable.

What caused the Big Bang? Was there anything before the Big Bang? What evidence do we have for the
Big Bang? When we say the universe is expanding, what exactly is expanding?

Using the materials (balloon and stickers) from the previous activity enabled us to detect the light of other
galaxies. This light is found to be redshifted (the light looks “stretched”). This suggests that other galaxies are
moving farther away from ours. It was later determined that they are not moving away. Instead, space itself is
expanding in all directions causing all the galaxies to be relatively farther apart. From this “redshift” we learn
how fast the universe is expanding. Redshift is the first piece of evidence for the Big Bang model.

Similar to the Big Bang, a balloon expands very rapidly at the start, then more slowly when it has already
inflated. But some evidence shows that the expansion is now accelerating again. The balloon is the universe
and space itself. There is no classroom for it to expand into.

Before 1917, many scientists thought that the universe always existed. But Einstein’s revolutionary theory of
gravity changed all the rules. It opened up the mind-blogging possibility that space itself – the permanence of
which had never been questioned – might actually be expanding. If space is expanding, the universe that we
inhibit today could have infinitely smaller.

In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble made the amazing discovery that distant galaxies are speeding away from
us. This means that the galaxies we see today are much closer together – originating from a tiny region of
space. The origin of the universe remains one of the greatest questions in science. Current scientific evidence
supports the Big Bang was an expansion of space itself. Every part of space participated in it. Space is not
simply emptiness; it’s real stretchable, flexible thing. Galaxies are moving away from us because space is
expanding. Galaxies are moving with space, not through space.

D.3 ENGAGEMENT

Activity 2: Cosmic Inflation Experiment

Materials: balloons, balloon pump (optional), small stickers (any design)

Instructions:
1. Stick small stickers randomly on the surface of the uninflated balloon
2. Quickly inflate the balloon with a pump or your breath. Observe the stickers.

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 3. Answer the following questions on a separate sheet of paper.
a. Why do the stickers appear to be moving away from each other?
b. Are the stickers moving across the balloon? Explain.
c.Do the stickers themselves grow in size? Explain.

D.4 ASSIMILATION

Activity 3: Modified TRUE or FALSE.

Direction: On the space before each number, write TRUE if the statement is correct; if the statement is
FALSE, change the italicized word to make it true.
_________1. Galaxies are moving away from us because space is expanding.
_________2. The Steady State Theory is the most widely accepted model about the creation of the
universe.
________3. Science brings forth a cosmological theory, not from belief, but from scientific evidence that the
universe once began to expand and continues to expand until today.
________4. According to the Big Bang theory, the universe began 8.9 billion years ago.
________5. The universe cooled down as it expanded.
________6. The relative abundance of light elements in the universe is the second piece of evidence to
prove that the Big Bang occurred.
________7. Redshift is the third piece of evidence for the Big Bang model.
________8. Atom is composed of smaller subatomic particles as protons, neutrons and electrons
________9. The research of Georges Lemaître helped prove that the universe is expanding.
________10. Space itself expanded faster than the speed of light.
________11. Protons and neutrons came together to form different types of nuclei by nuclear fission.

_______ 12. While the universe is still hot and dense, pairs of matter and antimatter were formed from
energy.
_______13. Edwin Hubble proposed an expanding model for the universe to explain the observed redshifts of
spiral nebulae.
_______14. Atoms became neutral due to the binding of nuclei and electrons after recombination.
______ 15. The Big Bang was NOT an explosion that carried matter outward from a point.

E. Guide Questions:

1. Do you believe that the universe is expanding?

2. What is the importance of living in an expanding universe?

Reflection

Is it important to know whether the universe is expanding or not? Why?

F. References

Commission on Higher Education. Teaching Guide for Senior High School: Physical Science. Book.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B869YF0KEHr7SHFGVG5mVFFhcXc/view.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0

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Sagan, C. (2000). Chapter 26: The Cosmic Connection. In J. Agel (Ed.), Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection: An
Extraterrestrial Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Checked by:

MRS. LINA P. FALTADO

Head Teacher IV / SHS Focal Person

Noted by:

GABRIEL R. ROCO, EdD

Principal IV