Some days the world just throws math lessons in your lap:
Record setting black hole found
Potential lessons that scream out of this:
- Ratios
- Scientific notation
- Volume & Density
- Rates
Or you just combine all of the above to try to get some sort of number sense of just how crazy extreme that stuff is.
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{ 2 } Comments
Thanks for pointing this out. I was still waking up when the story came on the radio this morning and am sure I would have missed it otherwise.
Also, I love that the article includes examples of how to properly cite it. I'm not teaching research writing, but would bet that citation is a skill most of my students don't have.
BTW, if you want to go all tech, you can find the formula for Schwarzschild radius and then use Google's badass calculator to figure out what the actual diameter should be.
You can then let them play around with other masses, and realize that if they squished their teacher to be a black hole, they'd have to stack a trillion of him end to end to be as wide as an electron.
If they're more advanced (than my 8th graders, at least), you can let them try to figure out (using the calculator, of course) how big/massive a black hole would have to be to average the density of lead.
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