What did you change in the model?
Labs / Astronomy
Reading Starlight
A star's glowing surface makes a smooth rainbow, but the cooler gas above it stamps dark lines into that light — one exact pattern for each element. Toggle candidate elements to lay their reference lines over the spectrum, and see which fingerprints line up with the dark bands. That is literally how we know what stars, and everything else, are made of.
Labs / Astronomy / Reading Starlight
Reading Starlight
A star's glowing surface makes a smooth rainbow, but the cooler gas above it stamps dark lines into that light — one exact pattern for each element. Toggle candidate elements to lay their reference lines over the spectrum, and see which fingerprints line up with the dark bands. That is literally how we know what stars, and everything else, are made of.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
Astronomy uses patterns in light and motion to explain objects we cannot touch directly. This model lets you change one part of a space system and see what the evidence would look like.
Explore
Try the model
λ —line —match —
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- Turn on Sodium. Its two lines sit almost on top of each other — can you zoom in far enough to split the pair apart?
- Switch to the Blue (B) star and crank the temperature up. Why do Helium's lines only show up on the hottest stars?
- On the Sun, slide the temperature toward 10,000 K. Which element's lines get stronger, and which fade out?
- Toggle on an element the star does not contain. How do its ticks tell you “no match”?
- If two different elements share a line at almost the same wavelength, how could you ever tell them apart?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Look for a cause-and-effect rule: what did you change, what responded, and what stayed the same? Astronomers use those patterns to infer how distant systems work.
Check
Before you leave
What visible evidence changed?
What rule could explain that change?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.