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Spirals
There are galaxies out in space that look like spirals. In fact, our galaxy, the Milky Way has recently been shown to be a spiral galaxy. One of the things that SKA will help us do is to determine how galaxies form spirals.
Mathematicians study shapes like spirals, and because they can act like flat springs, they get used in a lot of different ways. They’re handy shapes to know about, and look awesome too!
We have some different ways of drawing different spirals:
- using a ruler and pencil (Spiral of Theodorus) [ download doc ] [ download pdf ]
- using a cylindrical object and some string (Archimedes’ Spiral from the ‘outside in’) [ download doc ] [ download pdf ]
- using the fact that for each degree Archimedes Spiral turns through the distance from the centre increases by the same amount (Archimedes’ Spiral from the ‘inside out’) [ download doc ] [ download pdf ]
The inside out method for Archimedes Spiral lends itself to some further exploration; we have provided some templates for this.
