Astronomy VCU 2019 Fall Final Part 1
A star is found to have absolute magnitude 4 and apparent magnitude 19. How far away is it?
10,000 parsecs.
The diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy is close to
100,000 light years.
The time from one Full Moon to the next is 29.5 days. The length of a sidereal month is
27 days.
Which of the following planets has a system of rings made of ice-covered rocks?
Saturn
Which of the following planets has the highest surface temperature?
Venus
The first soft landing on Mars was by the
Viking landers.
Which of the following objects is closest in size to a black hole formed from the collapse of a star?
a neutron star.
Comets that originate in the Outer Oort Cloud have orbits that are
at all angles to the plane of the solar system.
In a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, white dwarf stars such as Sirius B are
at the lower left.
Adaptive optics is used to correct telescopes for
atmospheric turbulence.
Here is the Drake Equation. In this equation, n_{e} stands for the
average number of habitable planets in a planetary system.
Liquid water tends to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of a planet by
dissolving it and washing it out of the atmosphere.
The dark side of the Moon, where the Sun never shines,
does not exist.
The molecules of both liquid water and ice are held together by
hydrogen bonds.
The stars of the Milky Way are mostly found
in a band of stars stretching across the sky.
According to the Law of Inertia, a moving object that feels no outside force will
keep moving.
The moon Ganymede is
larger than the planet Mercury but smaller than the planet Mars.
In comparison to Cepheid variables, RR Lyra variable stars are
less luminous and more common.
In one day, the position of the Sun on the Celestial Sphere
moves eastward along the ecliptic by 1°.
During a meteor shower, shooting stars seem to be coming from
the radiant.
One reason that temperatures are lower in the winter than in the summer is that
the sun is lower in the sky in the winter.
Mercury rotates so that its sidereal day lasts for
two thirds of a complete orbit around the Sun.
The surface of Pluto can best be described as
varied with ice mountains and almost no craters at all.
Which of the following magnitudes corresponds to the dimmest star?
+5.6
A solar sail is a large sheet of light-reflecting plastic spread on an extremely low-mass framework and attached to a spacecraft. Sunlight exerts a force on the sail and moves the spacecraft. Suppose the spacecraft has a total mass of 1000kg (including the sail) and sunlight exerts a total force of 5N on the sail. What will be the acceleration of the spacecraft?
0.005m/s².
The closest star to our sun is about four light years away. In the center of our galaxy, a typical distance between neighboring stars would be
0.04 light years.
The mass of a carbon atom is 12.00amu while the mass of a deuterium atom is 2.014amu. If a gamma ray photon splits a carbon atom into six deuterium atoms, how much energy is converted into mass?
0.084amu
What total force will cause an object with a mass of 1kg to gain 10 meters per second every second?
10 Newtons.
A starship observes that a nearby star has apparent magnitude 4.0. The spectrum of the star indicates that it is a type that normally has absolute magnitude 4.0. From these observations, the starship knows that it is
10 parsecs from the star.
Suppose that a flash of lightning from a cloud 2000 meters away is followed by a clap of thunder two seconds later. Assume that the light arrived in a negligible time and calculate the speed of the sound waves.
1000m/s
A star at a distance of 10,000pc should have an apparent brightness equal to its absolute brightness multiplied by
10⁻⁶.
Suppose that you lift an object by exerting an upward force of 22 Newtons on it. If gravity exerts a force of 5 Newtons downward on the object, what is the total force on the object?
17 Newtons.
The first successful soft landing on the Moon was Surveyor 1 in
1966.
Which of the following time periods is closest to the time from a New Moon to the next Waning Quarter Moon?
22.5 days.
It now (2016) appears that, except for the universe itself, the largest structure in nature has a size of approximately
300 million light years.
A suborbital rocket such as an intercontinental ballistic missile or perhaps a passenger rocket from North America to Australia is most likely to leave the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of
4 miles per second.
Which of the following temperatures would be most likely at noon on the hottest day of the year in the warmest part of Mars?
50F.
The density of water is 1000kg/m³, the density of rock is about 3000kg/m³, and the density of iron is 7800kg/m³. Which of the following densities is closest to the average density of the Earth?
5200kg/m³
At 8pm, you see that the pointer stars of the Big dipper and the star Polaris are arranged in a vertical line. How long, give or take a few minutes, would you need to wait to see them arranged in a horizontal line?
6 hours.
The red line of a spectrum is normally at a wavelength of 656 nm. In the light of a star that is moving away from us, we might expect to see that red line at a wavelength of
660 nm.
If the planets are numbered from 1 to 8, going outward from the Sun, the planet Uranus is number
7.
Assume that the Hubble constant is 72 km/s/Mpc. If a galaxy is 10Mpc away, how fast is it moving away from us?
720km/s
In the Earth's atmosphere, the percentage that is Nitrogen is roughly
80%.
Epsilon Eridani shows a proper motion of 0.97661 arc seconds per year. In 100 years, its position in the sky changes by
97.661 seconds of arc.
The fact that the surface of Mars shows no tectonic activity means that one of the requirements for continuing life might be missing.
A carbon-return process.
The Local Supercluster is
A cluster of clusters of galaxies with the Virgo cluster at the center.
Aristarchus of Samos is known for a number of things. One of them was
A model in which the Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the Sun.
The closest star to Earth (other than the Sun) is part of a multiple star system called
Alpha Centauri.
The first spacecraft to go into orbit around Saturn was
Cassini-Huygens.
In the Hertzsprung-Russelll Diagram shown, which point represents a star of type B with absolute magnitude +10?
D
Of all the things that might go wrong with distances found by using the method that astronmers refer to as the "distance ladder," which of these is the one that an astronomer would say is most likely?
Distant objects are not behaving the same as nearby objects.
A galaxy that is a featureless spherical ball of stars would be called a type
E0.
Although most records from that time were lost in the burning of the Great Library at Alexandria, most historians say that the first actual measurement of the Earth's circumference was made in the 3^{rd} century BCE by
Eratosthenes of Cyrene.
Which of the following spectral classes corresponds to the lowest surface temperature (on this list)?
K
Changes in the intensity of sunlight due to shifts in both the Earth's orbit and rotation axis cause
Milankovich cycles.
Our Sun's location in the Milky Way is closest to the
Orion Spur.
Which of the following statements is falsifiable?
Passenger pigeons are extinct.
The closest star to the North Celestial Pole that is visible to the naked eye is
Polaris
Which of these was the Solar System model that assumed the Earth is fixed and the Sun, Moon, and planets all move on epicycles that, in turn move on circular orbits around the Earth?
Ptolemaic model.
High protostellar winds of ejected gas occur when the protostar is in the
Tau Tauri phase.
Which of Kepler's Laws governs how a particular planet speeds up and slows down?
The Equal Area Law.
Voyager 2 is the only space probe so far to have visited
Uranus
The star Wemadeit shows a stellar parallax angle of 0.3 seconds of arc while the star Waytoofar shows a stellar parallax angle of 0.4 seconds of arc. From this, you can conclude that
Waytoofar is closer to our Sun than Wemadeit.
A star that is named Delta Cepheus is most likely
a fairly dim star in the constellation Cepheus.
Suppose that someone who works at the U.S. Naval Observatory says that he saw the Moon rise at 6:45pm on April 25, 2008. This statement is most likely
an actual observation of the natural world.
Neptune has
an atmosphere of Hydrogen and Helium with some methane.
The theory that dark matter is not real and is just a a problem with our theory of gravity has been falsified by
an observation of what happens when clusters of galaxies collide.
A star that forms an iron core most likely has a mass of
between 15 and 20 solar masses.
The source that is called Sgr A* emits
both X-rays and radio waves.
When Galileo wanted to understand how falling objects move, he did all of the things on the following list. Choose the one thing that is very different from the way that the ancient greeks approached the subject. He
built inclined planes and measured how balls roll down them.
Space probes often use gravitational slingshot maneuvers. The main purpose of these maneuvers is to
change the direction and speed of the probe without using rockets.
At present (within the last few hundred years), the distance from the Earth to the Sun
changes enough to make the intensity of sunlight vary by 6 percent.
If you are looking down over the south pole of the Earth, you will see the Earth rotate
clockwise.
Stars usually come in clusters, all born at about the same time, because
collapsing interstellar clouds usually fragment.
The currently accepted theory of how the Moon formed is the
collision theory.
Mars' orbit is currently (within the last few hundred years)
elliptical enough to make the intensity of sunlight vary by 40 percent.
Kepler was an early advocate of the Copernican Theory. When he applied it to Tycho's observations, it
failed but led to a better theory.
Protostars are
far brighter than typical stars because of their large surface area.
The semiliquid rock that is found inside the Earth
flows like a liquid under gradual pressure but is stiff like a solid under sudden pressure.
Many asteroids can best be described as
flying rocks or possibly flying mountains.
The nucleus of a comet consists of
frozen gas, ice, and dust.
According to our current (very tentative) estimates, a spaceship travelling from our Sun to one of the nearest stars such as Alpha Centauri A would probably be traveling through the Oort cloud of our Sun and that of Alpha Centauri A for a distance that is
half of the whole trip.
According to Newton's Law of Gravity, the gravitational attraction of the Earth for other objects, such as the Moon, apples on trees and spacecraft in low earth orbit,
is smaller for objects farther from the Earth but never vanishes entirely.
The eclipse or transit photometry method of searching for exoplanets can be expected to find
less than one out of every 10 exoplanets.
The dark markings on the Full Moon that make up the face of the "Man in the Moon" are called Lunar
maria.
From the period and radius of an object's orbit, we can calculate the mass of
matter inside the object's orbit.
As compared to lower frequency electromagnetic radiation, higher frequency electromagnetic radiation will usually cause
more damage.
In a spiral galaxy, long-lived stars such as our Sun
move in and out of spiral arms.
The temperature on Saturn is
much colder than anywhere on Earth.
The mass of Betelgeuse is about 20 times the mass of our own Sun. Our Sun is expected to have a total life span of about 10 billion years. The life span of Betelgeuse is expected to be
much shorter.
One of the experiments carried out by the Viking Landers was to use a mass spectrometer to analyze the gas given off from a heated soil sample. The results of that experiment (as interpreted at the time) established that Martian soil contains
no carbon compounds at all.
The distance from the Earth to the Sun is
one astronomical unit.
The Doppler shift of familiar spectral lines from gas clouds and stars in our galaxy measures their
orbital velocities within the galaxy.
The main reason to suspect that Europa has a subsurface ocean of water is
patterns of cracks in the ice on its surface.
The habitable zone of a planetary system is defined to be the region where
planetary surfaces permit the existence of liquid water.
Which of the following particles would be repelled by a proton?
positron.
A hydrogen atom with its electron removed (a H⁺ ion in other words) is actually a
proton.
Neutron stars are often observed as
pulsars.
A star that is cooling and swelling just enough to keep the same total brightness could be a
red subgiant.
Most plants here on Earth are green because the process of converting carbon dioxide and water into organic matter uses only
red, blue, and violet light.
Earthquakes are often caused by
slipping tectonic plates.
Think of the `front' of a telescope as the end that light enters. A telescope with Newtonian Focus has the eyepiece
sticking out the side near the front.
Galaxies are organized into clusters and other large non-uniform structures that
stop with voids and filaments (made of superclusters), which are themselves uniformly distributed.
When the helium fuel runs out at the center of a horizontal branch star, it
swells up and becomes a red supergiant.
The average energy of motion of an atom or molecule in a gas is called its
temperature.
From his observations of the phases of Venus, Galileo concluded that the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion was wrong because it predicted
that there could never be a Full Venus, but Galileo saw one.
In Newton's Theory, all of the following statements are actually incorrect but one is a better approximation than the others.
the Earth and Moon move around their center of mass, which, in turn, goes around the Sun.
The greenhouse effect is important because it suggests an effect on
the Earth's climate.
The Kuiper Belt was named after Gerard Kuiper, who said that
the belt formed early in the history of the solar system but should not still be there because Pluto would have cleared its neighborhood of smaller objects.
The luminosity class of a star is determined by measuring
the broadening of spectral lines.
By measuring the angle between the Sun and the Moon when the Moon was in its first or third quarter, the ancient Greeks were able to calculate
the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
A bazooka is actually a small rocket-launcher. The reason a bazooka does not have a recoil is that
the force on the rocket is exerted by the rocket exhaust and not by the launcher.
Suppose that you drop a wooden ball and an iron ball, both the exact same diameter, from the same height at the same time. Aristotle would predict that
the iron ball would hit the ground long before the wooden ball.
A sidereal day is the time it takes for
the stars to come back to the same positions in the sky.
Venus retains a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere because
there is no liquid water there.
You hear about an asteroid impact threat at level 10 on the Torino Scale. You should
think about ways to get off the planet.
A planet that is following Kepler's Laws, accelerates
toward the Sun.
You are standing at the edge of a great desert at noon time. In front of you is a sea of hot sand. Behind you is the coolness of a green and growing forest. Which way is the wind most likely blowing?
toward the desert.
Retrograde Motion refers to the
westward motion of the planets relative to the stars.
If an object is moving at constant speed in a straight line, its acceleration is
zero.
