Assignment:
I. Practice Questions
1. Where does nuclear fusion occur in the Sun?
2. What's the phase of matter in the Sun?
3. How does the energy produced at the core of the Sun get transferred to the surface?
4. What is the average temperature of the surface of the Sun?
5. What are the axes of a Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram? And on a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, where would we find red giant stars?
6. What's the apparent magnitude of the faintest star visible to the naked eye under the best possible conditions on Earth?
7. How old is the Sun?
8. How did the nuclear fusion reaction in the Sun start initially?
9. In a dark room, a red rose under a green light would appear as what color?
10. How does the apparent brightness of a star change with distance?
11. What are the stellar spectral types, from highest to lowest surface temperature?
12. What is the Sun made of?
13. What's the luminosity of a star? What's the apparent brightness of a star?
14. What are the apparent magnitude and the absolute magnitude of a star?
15. What's the diameter of the mirrors for the world's largest optical telescopes?
16. How does the mass of a star affect its longevity?
17. What counterbalances gravity in brown dwarfs and white dwarfs?
18. What is antimatter?
19. What is the greatest mass a newborn star can have? And what kind of pressure prevents stars of extremely large mass from forming?
20. How many high ocean tides do we have due to the gravitational force of the Moon?
21. How doe the kinetic energy of driving at 30 mph compare with driving at 15 mph?
22. How doe the momentum of driving at 30 mph compare with driving at 15 mph?
23. How would you describe degeneracy pressure?
24. You can say we are all "star stuff" (or star dust); why is that?
25. When does a star become a main-sequence star?
26. How does a main-sequence star regulate its own temperature and size?
27. What are the major stages of life for a low-mass star?
28. What's the energy source for the Sun?
29. What would you see if you look at a white light source through a prism?
(Don't look directly at the Sun, except through the right kind of filter!!!)
30. Consider two pucks with same mass sitting on the surface of ice, where friction is negligible. One puck moves at a constant velocity of v. It then collides with a second puck head-on and stops. What must the velocity of the second puck be after the collision?
31. What is the meaning of E = mc2?
32. What's room temperature in °F, °C and K?
33. What is the wavelength of a wave?
34. Photon 1 has longer wavelength than photon 2. How do their energies, frequencies, and speeds compare?
35. What's the difference between potential energy and kinetic energy? Give two examples for each kind.
II. Practice Questions
1. What is the total number of galaxies in the observable universe?
2. How are speed and velocity different?
3. Rank the following objects from the smallest to the largest:
Earth, Sun, Local Group, Virgo cluster, Pluto, Halley's Comet, Coma Supercluster, The Large Magellan Cloud, Milky Way Galaxy, Moon, Jupiter.
4. True or False: The orbits of nearly all large objects in the solar system, the planets and large moons, go from East to West.
5. True or False: The rotation of nearly all large objects in the solar system, the Sun, the planets, and large moons go from West to East.
6. What is the apparent retrograde motion of a planet, like Mars or Saturn?
7. How did the ancient Greeks measure the radius of the earth?
8. One evening you see the moon starts to rise from the eastern horizon as the Sun is beginning to set. The moon will appear as _________________.
9. One evening at 7 PM you see a crescent Moon setting shortly after sunset. Is it a waxing or waning crescent?
10. How did the observation of the four moons of Jupiter by Galileo invalidate the geocentric system?
11. Around which part of a comet's orbit does it have "hair"?
12. Roughly, what's the size of the Milky Way galaxy?
13. What type of galaxy is the MW?
14. What did Ptolemy propose to explain the retrograde motion of a planet?
15. How do we know the Crab nebula is the remnant of a supernova explosion?
16. Where is the center of mass of a hammer, roughly? Close to the tip of the handle or the hammerhead?
17. True or False: Kepler's First Law says planets go around the Sun in elliptical orbits and the Sun is at the center of the orbit.
18. What does Kepler's Third Law say?
19. What does Kepler's Third Law imply? A planet whose orbit is far away from the Sun will have higher or lower average velocity than a planet whose orbit is close to the Sun?
20. Order the eight planets according to their distances from the Sun.
21. Kepler's Second Law implies that when a planet is closer to the Sun in its orbit, it is moving faster or slower than when it's far away from the Sun?
22. What trajectory does the center of mass of an object follow as it is thrown into the air at some angle (between 0 and 90°)?
23. What does Hubble's Law state?
24. True or False: According to Newton's First Law, when a spaceship runs out of fuel, it will gradually come to a stop.
25. Since 2006, Pluto has been classijied as ___________________.
26. Roughly how big is the Sun, a Jupiter-like planet, an Earth-like planet, a typical dwarf planet, a typical asteroid, and a typical comet?
27. The longest day in a year on Earth happens on: Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Fall Equinox, or Winter Solstice?
III. Practice Questions
1. What is the average temperature of the surface of the Sun?
2. How long does it take for light from the Sun to reach Earth?
3. Why do astronauts in the International Space Station feel weightless?
4. Where does nuclear fusion occur in the Sun?
5. One morning you see the Moon at its highest point in the sky as the Sun is about to rise. The Moon will appear as
6. What's the phase of matter in the Sun?
7. List three pieces of observational evidence for dark matter.
8. What are the axes of a Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram? On a H-R diagram,where would we find white dwarfs?
9. What's the apparent magnitude of the faintest star visible to the naked eye underthe best possible conditions on Earth?
10. How old is the Sun?
11. How did the nuclear fusion reaction in the Sun start initially?
12. What is the total number of galaxies in the observable universe?
13. How does the apparent brightness of a star change with distance?
14. What is the meaning of E = mc? How can this equation be fully realized?
15. What is the Sun made of?
16. What prompted astronomers and astrophysicists to propose the existence of "dark energy" since the late 1990's?
17. What's the luminosity of a star? What's the apparent brightness of a star?
18. How does the mass of a star affect its longevity?
19. What counterbalances gravity in brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, and neutron stars?
20. What is antimatter?
21. How doe the kinetic energy of driving at 30 mph compare with driving at 15 mph?
22. Why can't the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation be perfectly uniform everywhere?
23. True of False: The rotation of nearly all large objects in the solar system, the Sun, the planets, and large moons go from West to East.
24. What does Hubble's Law state?
25. What is gravitational lensing?
26. One evening, at 8 PM, a crescent Moon is setting. The next evening at 8 PM, will the Moon appear smaller or larger compared with the previous night?
27. You can say we are all "star stuff" (or star dust); why is that?
28. When does a star become a main-sequence star?
29. What is the wavelength of a wave?
30. What are the major stages of life for a low-mass star?
31. What do massive-star supernovae leave behind?
32. What do white dwarf supernovae leave behind?
33. Iron is at the end of the line for nuclear fusion processes in stars. How and where are heavier elements made?
34. What's the White Dwarf limit? And what's the significance of it?
35. How does a white-dwarf supernova happen?
36. What is redshift? What is blueshift? How do you determine whether a galaxy is moving away or toward us?
37. What's a black hole?
38. What happens when an electron in an atom goes from a higher energy state/level to a lower energy state/level? From lower to higher?
39. What is the size of the event horizon of a stellar mass black hole? How does the size of the event horizon of a black hole vary with its mass?
40. Roughly how big is the Sun, a planet, a typical dwarf planet, a typical asteroid, and a typical comet?
41. The longest day in a year on Earth happens on: spring equinox, summer solstice, fall equinox, or winter solstice?
42. What observational evidence do scientists have of the existence of black holes?
43. Photon 1 has longer wavelength than photon 2. How do their energies, frequencies, and speeds compare?
44. Suppose you built a scale-model atom in which the nucleus was the size of a pea. About how big would the atom be?