Forces And Planetary Winds

This lesson has students use their understanding of Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation and Third Law of Motion to characterize forces occurring in deep space while they learn about cutting-edge astronomy research on planetary winds. This lesson should take approximately one or two 50-minute class periods and is designed to be used in an introductory high school physics course.

Related resources

Topics

  • SP2
  • SP5
  • HS-PS3-3
  • CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RST.9-10.1
  • astrophysics
  • engineering
  • exoplanet detection
  • solar wind
  • Newton's Laws
  • Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation
  • Newton’s third law of motion
  • atmospheric wind
  • escape velocity
  • exoplanet
  • gravity
  • planetary wind
  • stellar wind