We watched a Zula today on the planets and their rings. So, rings are made of ice, dust, and rock… “Mom? Why are the rings stuck around the planet like that? Why don’t the rings orbit on their own?
Cecily comprehends gravity well. She also understands the relationship between orbits and gravity, as well as the concept of mass and “amount” of gravity (this is how she rationalizes it at this point).
The settling in to a stable orbit is what seems to have her captivated. She is seeking understanding of why/how. She knows about the asteroid belt, comets, and wandering asteroids that turn into meteors. She also knows that the orbits of the planets are like their tracks and they stick with them, but her understanding of this is that they do so because the sun tells them to. She doesn’t understand why the rings don’t slip off the top or bottom of the planets. She says, “They aren’t stuck to them, cuz you can see space in between the planet and the rings. So why don’t they float off and back on, and around like frisbees?”
Further, “Are the rings somehow connected?”
She went and located a few of her ring bracelets (the flexible ones from my childhood) and stuck them together. Then she put them around a ball and showed me the space in between. We discovered the rings indeed could slip off/on the ball (planet) and that they came apart. So, she reasoned that maybe the rings on Saturn, since they are so visually distinct in being plural, might sometimes separate. Though, she stated, Neptune doesn’t seem to have more than one bracelet. (I left that alone at this point.)
THEN, she decided to fling the rings at me and tell me to catch them like the sun and fling them back like boomerangs. I asked her to define a track on the carpet for them to follow.
This is what my days look like.
🙂