Dark Matter: Proposal for a Potentially Meaningful Teaching Unit (PMTU) for introduction of Contemporary Physics in High School

This work reports the creation and application of a Potentially Meaninful Teaching Unit that aims to use content and experiments in classical physics to introduce the concept of dark matter to high school students, as a way of making classes more interesting and awakening the curiosity for science and current topics in physics. For that, we will elaborate and study the rotation curves of three spiral galaxies. The analysis of galaxy’s rotation curves was what generated the first evidence of the existence of dark matter. We can carry out the study of these rotation curves using basic concepts about circular motion, Kepler's laws and gravitation, which are present in the curriculum of Brazilian schools.