Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-2026

Abstract

Long Description (About):  Have you ever wondered about how to scale size in space? Or think about the distance between planets and how to explain that to learners? The distances are so immense, compared to our everyday experience, an easy way to express and discuss these large distances is needed. It is also helpful to compare distances to what is familiar, especially for emerging learners. A series of movies does do this, but the challenge is to appreciate, at some level, how the zooming out (or in) is happening. The Power of 10 concept can be helpful to understand and deal with large values and large changes. Besides astronomical distances and the size of things, powers of ten and orders of magnitude are used to describe how dim or bright our eyes can see or how loud or soft our ears can hear. Both our eyes and ears have large “dynamic range” which simply means we can hear very faint sounds and dim lights and also very loud sounds or bright lights.  Similarly, the smallest objects we can detect with our microscopes and the most distant objects in space that can be detected with telescopes span over 40 powers or ten or more that 40 orders of magnitude. This means it would take more than 1040 of the smallest objects to reach the farthest objects. Often it is easier to use logarithms to keep track of these powers of ten (see the two Brightness and Distance to Stars activities). The reason logarithms are so useful is that the whole number part of the logarithm is the power of 10 and the fractional part is the number between 1 and 10. This is for logarithms based on the number 10. Other bases are possible, but here let’s just use base 10.

Publisher

South Dakota State University

Download

Share

COinS