Chapters 28-29 Quiz

The standard bulbs (standard candles) that made it possible for astronomers to discover the acceleration in the expansion of the universe were

Type Ia supernovae

Where in space did the expansion of the universe begin?

everywhere at once

Which of the following is a way that having an active galactic nucleus (AGN), with a supermassive black hole in the center, can affect the development of a galaxy?

huge energetic jets from the accretion disk can disturb and lessen star formation in the galaxy

If we want to see what galaxies looked like a time close to the beginning of the universe, where should we look?

in a direction away from the place of the Milky Way, where we can see very faint galaxies that are more than 10 billion light-years away

Which of the following is not true about the Local Group of galaxies (of which the Milky Way is a member)?

it has about a thousand member galaxies

The reciprocal of the Hubble constant (1/H) is a rough measure of the:

the age of the universe

With enormous effort, a team of astronomers manages to collect enough light from a galaxy far, far away to produce a spectrum. That spectrum has lines from the elements carbon, silicon, and sulfur. This tells the team that

the galaxy must have had an entire generation of stars that was born, lives, and died

Recent observations indicate that the universe is expanding faster today than it was a few billion years ago (that, in other words, the expansion of the universe is accelerating.) What kind of observations have led astronomers to this surprising conclusion?

the measurement of galaxy distances using Type Ia supernovae

Some scientists speculate that our universe is not the only universe that exists, but the only one we can gather evidence about. This idea is called

the multiverse theory

One important way astronomers can learn in some detail about what happens when galaxies collide is

to simulate galaxy collisions on a large computer and watch what the simulation predicts