Renca students generated their own solar system with exoplanets in CATA workshop

Students interested in learning more about astronomy from the Jorge Alessandri Rodriguez school in that commune also participated in a talk on the origin, characteristics and evolution of black holes.

By throwing a dice several times, the high school students of the Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez school were able to define the type of star (red, yellow or blue), how many planets are around it, their characteristics (rocky or gaseous) and their orbits (which means whether they are hot or cold).

In this way, appealing to a very playful dynamic, the astronomer José Utreras, in charge of Contents and Dissemination of CATA, managed to explain to the young people of this educational precinct of Renca how random factors have influenced the conformation of our Universe and also understood how special our own solar system is in particular.

“The students really enjoyed the activity, especially the workshop, as it was so participatory. They were really interested, because they are very attracted to science. There are many who have a more scientific vocation and, in particular, they are very curious about the study of astronomy, so it was a good opportunity that CATA gave us to bring them closer to that reality”, says Dani Rojas, librarian of the Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez school.

Meanwhile, the talk “Journey to a Black Hole” addressed the origin of these spatial phenomena, approaching concepts of the Theory of Relativity and showing how research has evolved, going from the first conceptual studies to the confirmation of the existence of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. Likewise, the CATA astronomer approached them conceptually to the deformation that occurs in space-time, from the gravity generated by giant stars or black holes themselves. The students also discovered the magnitude of the scales and figures used in astronomy, such as, for example, that it is estimated that there are more than 100 million stellar black holes in the Milky Way.

With animations and videos, the students of this school in Renca lived the experience of falling into a black hole, and understand what it would be like to see and feel the gravity of a black hole merger up close, how they can dull the brightness of a galaxy and how we could use them as time machines to travel to a very distant future, but without the possibility of returning to our time.