Astronomy Flashcards
What star does the Earth revolve around?
Sol
What are the “seas” on the moon called?
Maria
What are the two inferior planets?
Mercury and Venus
Name the moons of Mars
Phobos and Deimos
What is the y-axis of the HR diagram?
Luminosity/Absolute Magnitude
What does HR stand for?
Hertzprung-Russel
What are the spectral classes?
O,B,A,F,G,K,M
What is a helpful HR mnemonic?
Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me (OBAFGKM)
What is the speed of light in miles per second?
186,252
What is the speed of light in meters/second?
299,792,458
What is the brightest star in the night sky?
Sirius (Alpha Canis Majoris)
What is (usually) the brightest object in the night sky? (Excluding the moon)
Venus
Name the Galilean moons of Jupiter
Io, Callisto, Europa, Ganymede
Who invented the telescope?
Hans Lippershey
Who is generally accredited with our present model of the solar system?
Nicolaus Copernicus
When was the Crab Supernova observed by Chinese astronomers?
1054 CE
What force prevents main sequence and giant stars from collapsing?
hydrostatic pressure
What force prevents white dwarves from collapsing?
Electron degeneracy pressure
What force prevents neutron stars from collapsing?
Neutron degeneracy pressure
What is the Chandrasekhar limit?
The maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star
How many solar masses is the Chandrasekhar limit?
1.39
Who discovered that the distant galaxies tended to be moving away from one another? (the universe was expanding)
Edwin Hubble
Who developed the telescope consisting solely of mirrors?
Sir Isaac Newton
What is the world’s largest radio telescope?
Arecibo, located in northern Puerto Rico
What was the first manned mission to the moon?
Apollo 11
What was the first American satellite?
Explorer 1
What was discovered by Explorer 1?
the Van Allen radiation belts
Who oversaw the development of the Saturn V?
Wernher Von Braun
Who was the first human in space?
Yuri Gagarin
Who was the first woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova
When was Sputnik 1 launched?
October, 1957
What year did Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon?
1969
Who is basically the best person ever and was played by Ed Harris in what is basically the best movie ever? (He oversaw the salvage of Apollo 13)
Gene Kranz
What moon of Saturn is well known for it’s ice volcanos?
Enceladus
What is the largest (and coolest) moon of Saturn?
Titan
What is the primary moon of Pluto?
Charon
What is the belt of objects of which Pluto is a member?
Kuiper Belt
What object contains approximately 1/3 of the mass of the asteroid belt?
Ceres
What was Edmund Halley’s major contribution to astronomy?
The discovery that comets were periodic phenomena
What is the average distance between the Earth and Sun?
93 million miles
What body is said to contain trillions of comets at the very outer extent of the solar system?
Oort Cloud
What is the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way?
the Andromeda Galaxy (M31)
What class of objects is an extremely distant, extremely luminous, group of active galaxies containing supermassive black holes?
Quasars
What are rapidly rotating neutron stars called?
Pulsars
What planet does Triton orbit?
Neptune
What are clouds of plasma released by the sun called?
Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs)
What is the sun’s “atmosphere” called
the Corona
What instrument allows the viewing of the corona?
coronagraph
What allows the contents of a star or other object to be determined?
spectroscopy
What allows ground based observatories to counteract turbulence?
Adaptive Optics (AO)
What year was the sextant invented?
1757
