As part of our STEM week, we had a visit from Mel at NuSTEM to talk all about the role of a solar physicist.
We learned that ‘solar’ means to do with the sun and about what elements we can find in our sun. We looked at the light spectrum and discovered that only some of that is visible to our eyes!
Mel let us look through diffraction grating spectroscopes and were able to see how light that looks white, is actually made up of a rainbow of colours. When we looked at the sunlight, we could see black lines and this lets us understand which elements can be found in the sun.
We then made our own collaged visible light spectrums and placed black lines on top to show the elements visible in our own imaginary stars.
If you fancy having a go yourself, you could follow the NuSTEM tutorial below.
https://nustem.uk/activity/the-solar-physicist/