Astro Vocab Flashcards
What is a parsec?
A unit of distance equal to 3.26 light years.
What is a nebula?
A cloud of interstellar dust and gas.
What are various groups of stars that make a fimilar picture?
A constellation
What is the small celestial body that was fused together to make the planets?
The planetesimal.
What is a unit of length, equal to the mean distance of the earth from the sun: approximately 93 million miles.
An astronomical unit.
The distance traversed by light in one mean solar year is called a…
Light year.
What is the nuclear reaction in which atomic nuclei of a low numder fuse together to make a heavier nucleus the releases energy?
Nuclear Fusion.
The four planets closest to the sun with a compact rocky surface a called the…
Terrestrial Planets.
What are the planets farthest from the sun that are composed almost entirely of gas?
Gas giant planets
A celestial object with a nucleus made of ice and dust is… (When near the sun, it has a ‘tail’ of gas and particals pionting away from the sun)
A comet.
What are the small rocky bodies orbiting the sun.
Asteroids
An astronomer that studies the evolution and space-time relations of the universe is called a what?
Cosmologist.
Moon-sized object formed by the accumulation of planetesimals in the Early Solar System is a…
Protoplanetary.
What is the rate of change of angular position of a rotating body?
It is angular velocity.
What is it when something revolves around something else?
Orbit.
