Quizbowl study set- astronomy

5 dwarf planets: Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake

How many dwarf planets are there? Name all the dwarf planets.

Saturn (Saturn had amazing rings, made up of small rocks, ice and other particles), Jupiter (whose rings cannot be seen from our planet), Neptune (whose rings cannot be seen from our planet), and Uranus (has nine bright rings around it, as well as a few fainter ones—but all of these are difficult to see)

Name 4 planets with rings around them

Jupiter

Planet that Europa orbits

Chaos terrain

The frozen moon's surface is a layer of solid ice over a liquid sea — and that ice is shattered, cracked, broken, sunken, and twisted into contortions that science can't fully explain. But now a new study suggests one simple source of the Europan landscape that's so distorted it's called "chaos terrain."

Pluto

The greatest distance across the United States from Northern California to Maine is nearly 2,900 miles . This planet is just over 1,400 miles across, less than half the width of the U.S. Nearly one hundred and seventy of this planet could fill the same space as the Earth. It is now known as a "dwarf planet." This planet's status had been in question for roughly thirty years—it just wasn't mentioned very often outside of the academic circles of astronomers who researched it.

Saturn

The planet Mimas orbits

Jupiter

The planet that Io orbits

Sun

The sun is, of course, the most important part of our solar system. Even though this brilliant ball of gas gives us light, heat, and energy—and pretty much makes everything work—it's sometimes easy to forget just how mind-bogglingly enormous our sun actually is. The sun makes up over ninety-nine percent of all of the mass in our entire solar system. Jupiter and some of the other large planets make up most of the rest, and Earth barely even registers in the equation.

Jupiter

This is the largest planet in our solar system, and is known mainly for the "big red spot"—a long-running storm on its surface. This planet also considered by scientists to be important for our safety. The reason for this is that its huge size and gravitational pull act as a protective barrier that shields the earth from space debris, pulling dangerous objects into its own orbit before they can reach us. One Frenchman named Pierre-Simon Laplace discovered a comet which appeared to be heading towards earth, but which got caught in this planet's gravitational field, and was completely removed from the solar system.

Uranus

This planet has an orbital tilt of eighty-two degrees, which means that it is practically on its side. The effect of this is that a seasons on this planet lasts about twenty earth years, and causes all sorts of odd weather.

Jupiter

This planet has the biggest ocean of any planet in our solar system. Orbiting in cold space five times farther from the sun than Earth, this planet retained much higher levels of hydrogen and helium when it formed than Earth did. Given this planet's mass and chemical composition, physics demands that way down under the cold cloud tops, pressures rise to the point that the hydrogen must turn to liquid. In fact there should be a deep planetary ocean of liquid hydrogen in this planet. Computer models show that not only is this the largest ocean known in the solar system, but that it is about 40,000 km deep - roughly as deep as the Earth is around

Venus

This planet is the black sheep of the planet world for it spins in the opposite direction.

Mars

This planet's rocks have been found on Earth (and they weren't brought here by humans). Chemical analysis of meteorites found in Antarctica, the Sahara Desert, and elsewhere have been shown by various means to have originated from this planet. For example, some contain pockets of gas that is chemically identical to the planet's atmosphere. These meteorites may have been blasted away from the planet due to a larger meteoroid or by a huge volcanic eruption, and later collided with Earth.

Herschel

but it's also home to "Herschel" — the name astronomers have given the massive crater situated on the moon's leading hemisphere. Io. At 139-kilometers wide, Herschel is almost one-third the diameter of Mimas itself, causing the moon to bear a striking resemblance to the Death Star. Incidentally, Herschel crater was discovered three years after the release of A New Hope (Star Wars has a way of predicting astronomical discoveries).

Thera Macula

Europa's Thera Macula, a region where the frozen skin of the moon has sagged into a valley full of weird bulges and huge blocks of ice.

Moon

The gravity on the moon, due to its small mass, is much less than what we experience on Earth. For comparison, the gravity on Earth is about six times stronger. This essentially means that you could jump roughly six times higher than you can on Earth. This would no doubt take a lot of getting used to.

Earth

The elemental composition of this planet is mostly iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, nickel, calcium, sodium, and aluminum. While such elements have been detected in locations throughout the universe, they are merely trace elements, vastly overshadowed by the much greater abundances of hydrogen and helium. Thus this planet, for the most part, is composed of rare elements. The cloud from which the planet formed from had a much higher abundance of hydrogen and helium, but being light gases, they were driven away into space by the sun's heat as the planet formed.

Venus

The hottest planet in our solar system because of it's thick atmosphere made up mainly of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) The temperature is 875 degrees Fahrenheit as an average and it remains a generally constant temperature. It's hot enough to melt tin and lead.

Mercury

This planets rotation lasts for nearly sixty Earth days and a year on that planet is the equivalent of around eighty-eight Earth days—which means that on this planet there are less than two days in a year. Due to the planet's strange orbit, the sun actually seems to travel backwards and forwards in the sky.

Sun

We live inside the sun. Normally we think of the sun as being that big, hot ball of light 93 million miles away. But actually, the sun's outer atmosphere extends far beyond its visible surface. Our planet orbits within this tenuous atmosphere, and we see evidence of this when gusts of the solar wind generate the Northern and Southern Lights. In that sense, we definitely live "inside" the sun. But the solar atmosphere doesn't end at Earth. Auroras have been observed on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and even distant Neptune. In fact, the outer solar atmosphere, called the "heliosphere," is thought to extend at least 100 A.U. That's nearly 10 billion miles. In fact the atmosphere is likely teardrop shaped due to the sun's motion in space, with the "tail" extending tens to hundreds of billions of miles downwind.

Dwarf planet

hey're essentially large planetary bodies which haven't cleared their orbit enough to be considered their own planet, but which at the same time aren't orbiting another planet in a way that could cause them to be considered a moon.