Leah's weekend report - Dr. Sally Ride and variable stars

We couldn't find an interesting science article in the newspaper
this weekend, so we had to substitute with something a little different, but I think you'll find my two science reports interesting anyway. In our Girl Scout troop two weeks ago, we earned the Space Exploration badge. I had two reports I had to do for this particular badge. I thought they might be interesting to share with our class. I had to do definitions of some astronomy terms and a biography of a woman astronaut
or pilot.

Dr. Sally Ride was the first American woman to fly in space. Dr. Ride was born in the state of California. She dropped out of college to work on her tennis game full time. She then went back to school and majored in physics and English literature. While she was at school she saw an announcement that NASA was looking for people to be astronauts. She applied and got in. She went on the seventh flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983 and went again in 1984.

Variable stars are stars that sometimes look bright and sometimes look dim. Sometimes a star really does get brighter and dimmer and sometimes what looks like one variable star is really a bright star and a dim star rotating around each other. When the bright star is in front, it's brighter and when the dim star is in front, it's dimmer. A nova is a variable star that suddenly blasts off its outer layer. The
brightness lasts about a month. It can recur in about one hundred years. A supernova is the sudden death of a big star. When the star runs out of fuel, the star collapses but there is a big fireball for
about a year.

I got my information from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Aeronautics Division website and from the NASA website.

I'll see you on Monday afternoon!

Your reporter,
Leah Sinclair