P1.1 Visible Light And The Solar System Flashcards
What evidence did Galileo gather to support the heliocentric model?
He discovered four of Jupiter’s moons, which orbited Jupiter proving that not everything orbited Earth, giving evidence to support Copernicus’s idea.
How are are distant objects in space seen today?
Luminous objects give out visible light that travel as waves of energy. Photography has allowed astronomers to make more detailed observations as previously drawings were used which could be inaccurate.
What other ways can objects in space be observed?
Some objects don’t give out much visible light, but other types of energy-carrying waves like radio waves and microwaves which can be detected by different types of telescopes allowing more data for analysis to be collected.
What is refraction?
The change of speed and direction of a wave when it enters a new material.
Where does refraction occur?
At the interface between the two materials.
Why was the telescope such an important invention?
It allowed scientists to study the universe in greater detail with the naked eye.
What is a converging lens?
What does it do?
A glass block curved on both sides to make it thicker in the middle.
A convex lens focuses light rays from distant objects.
What is a focal length?
The distant from a convex lens to the point where the image of a very distant object is produced.
What is a refracting telescope?
A telescope consisting of a series of lenses. A convex (objective) lens creates an image inside the tube and another lens (eyepiece lens) is used to magnify the image.
What are the negatives of refracting telescopes?
They struggle to see very faint stars due to light reflection.
They need to be very long to have magnifications with large lenses. This makes it very heavy and difficult to make a perfect shape causing images to have distorted colours.
What is a reflecting telescope?
A telescope in which the fo using the main image is done by a curved mirror.
The curved primary mirror focuses parallel light rays from a distant object to an image in the same way as the objective lens in a refracting telescope. This image is then magnified by the eyepiece lens, also just like a refracting telescope.
What is a transverse wave?
A wave in which particles move at right angles to the direction that the wave is going.
What is an electromagnetic wave?
A transverse wave, examples are light, radio and microwaves.
What is a sound wave?
Not transverse waves. The particles move back and forth in a line with the direction the wave is going.
These are longitudinal waves.
What is a seismic wave?
Produced by earthquakes and explosions, they travel through the earth.
Solid rock material can be pushed and pulled (longitudinal seismic waves) or moved up and down or side to side (transverse seismic waves).
