This activity is part of teaching unit 5, Laws of Planetary Motion. You can find the introduction and teaching guide here.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics we can obtain a lot of information from objects in the Universe even though they are very far away and we cannot get close to them. One example is the quantification of the mass of our star, the Sun. In this activity you can calculate the mass of the Sun from observations of the planets. We suggest that you do the calculations and compare your results with the mass of other stars, which you can find by researching on the Internet. Is the Sun one of the heaviest stars or a rather normal one?

• Download the GUIDE of the activity.