Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Dear all,

I wish to create a model, for my students, to measure the decrease in light as a result of an object moving in front of a light source.

The idea is to simulate a transit and to calculate the relationship between the object size and the light curve.

Any help will be appreciated.

Vered Tal

Hi Vered,

This project might help: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ce#summary

Most modern smartphones have built-in light sensors and you can download apps that will measure light intensity. So in your case you would basically be doing this experiment but adding an object in between the phone and the light bulb (Figure 5 in the procedure). Note that this is an older project so it doesn't show LED bulbs but those would work too. Also note that the light reading will be affected by ambient light in the room from other sources (ceiling lights, sunlight, etc), so to get better readings you might need to turn off other lights and close window blinds etc.

If using a smartphone isn't possible for some reason, then you can also buy a standalone lux meter: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=lux+meter

Hope that helps! Please write back if you have more questions.

-Ben

To add on to what Ben provided above, the following link has a really good tutorial, with animated examples, of exoplanet discovery using Kepler data and exploiting the techniques you are looking to model.

https://avanderburg.github.io/tutorial/tutorial.html

Hope this helps.

- David

Whoops - it didn't even occur to me that the original post here might be about exoplanets. FYI we also have a bunch of projects on our site that may be useful: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/projects ... exoplanets

"I'm interested to know if you managed to do something about your project?
I am interested in your idea and what your students will say."