Past Paper Flashcards
What is the AU a measure of?
The average distance between Earth and the Sun
In the small angle formula tan 𝜃 (where 𝜃 is the angle separation in the sky of
two objects or the angular width of an object) is approximated to?
The ratio between the width of an object and its distance
What co-ordinates are used to locate a celestial object in the sky?
Right Ascension and Declination
What is the Pole star?
The ecliptic is?
The apparent path of the sun with the background of the stars
The copernican model lacked simplicity that?
The Sun appears to move relative to the stars. Copernicus’s model accounts for
this as being due to?
Why did the phenomenon of stellar parallax not convince people of Copernicus’s
time that his model was better than the geocentric model?
Stellar parallax had not yet been observed
In Ptolemy’s model of the Universe?
the Sun, Moon and 5 planets went round in circular orbits whose centres
moved round the Earth in circles
Which of the planets have a period of revolution around the Sun of less than 1
year?
Mercury and Venus
Astronomy is science because scientists?
make predictions about the cosmos based on models constructed from
observations
The four seasons—spring, summer, fall, winter—are caused primarily by?
the tilt of the Earth’s equatorial plane with respect to its orbit.
What features of Copernicus’ model reveals his hesitation in breaking with the conventional way of thinking?
he continued to use circles as planetary paths
From the law of equal areas (Kepler’s 3rd law), one can predict that the Earth:
spins faster when it is closer to the Sun.
Which observation made by Galileo demonstrated that the Ptolemaic model of
planetary motion was not correct?
the complete set of phases of Venus
The radius of the Earth was measured by Eratosthenes around 200 BC by?
noting the different altitude of the Sun at midday in Alexandria and at Syene,
two cities on the same meridian whose distance apart he knew.
The favoured explanation of the origin of the Moon is?
The large impact theory: the Moon was formed from material thrown out by the
impact on Earth of a Mars-sized body
A lunar eclipse occurs only at _____ Moon and a solar eclipse at _____ Moon?
full . . . new
Which of the following can be considered to be directly caused by tidal
interactions?
It has made one side of the Moon to always face the Earth
What true about craters on Mercury compared to the moon?
Mercury craters are shallower than the ones found at the Moon due to its larger
gravitational field
The point about which two bodies orbit each other under their mutual
gravitational attraction is known as the?
centre of mass
Stellar Parallax is defined as?
the apparent shifting of nearby stars with respect to distant ones as the position
of the observer changes
hat is not true about solar and lunar eclipses
Eclipses happen periodically, once every year
Craters on the Moon are generally circular because?
they were produced by subsurface explosions of material vaporised by
colliding bodies
The absolute magnitude of a star is measured by
its apparent magnitude if it were at a distance of 10 pc
The stars of binary star systems:
revolve around their centre of mass
Knowledge of which of the following allows us to calculate the mass of a binary
system?
The distance between the stars and their period of revolution
The primary method by which energy is transported from the centre of the Sun to
its surface is
convection
The two forces producing hydrostatic equilibrium in the Sun that determines its
size are
gravity and gas pressure
Einstein’s equation E=mc 2 explains?
relates mass with energy, and is responsible for the explanation of how
stars keep emitting copious energy for many millions of years
The standard model of the Sun
is a theoretical model of the Sun and its internal processes that describes the
variation of temperature and pressure from the surface to the centre
Sunspots are
areas of the photosphere that are comparatively cooler and slightly
depressed
The solar wind is
a fast moving plasma emitted by the Sun that reaches all the planets
Valles Marineris is a
large canyon on Mars
What is true of all of the planets
they rotate on their axes and revolve around the Sun
The factors which determine whether a planet or moon will retain an atmosphere
are its chemical composition, temperature, and ______.
Escape velocity
What does the planet Mercury look like?
The moon
Which model predicted that Venus would exhibit all phases (like the Moon
does)?
The heliocentric model
The greenhouse effect keeps Venus hot because?
The atmosphere is rich in carbon dioxide
The Roche limit refers to the
minimum distance between a planet and a large satellite (a Moon)
Concerning the question of whether water used to exist on Mars
the presence of water derived surface features such as dried up valleys puts
the matter beyond doubt
Planets and moons that have magnetic fields have in common that they
only have a molten core
In ascending order, the layers of our atmosphere are
the troposphere, the stratosphere, the mesosphere, the thermosphere, the
exosphere
What is not a green house gas?
Argon
What is the reaction that forms ozone?
O2+O+mol>O3+mol
What are three things that ozone does?
-Protects us from the UVB radiation
- Ozone heating, among other things, helps create the temperature inversion
that maintains the consistency of our lower atmosphere
- Ozone gives the sky at twilight its pale blue shading
George Aubourne Clark
created the first standard reference images for cloud identification
what does the acronym IPCC stand?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
What is albedo?
A measure of solar reflection
What is documentary climatology?
Sophisticated computer modelling of oceanic and atmospheric circulation
patterns to study changes wrought by the climate
In which region of the electromagnetic spectrum does the Earth emit the
majority of its radiation
The far IR region of the spectrum
why is ice a good material for
constructing igloos?
Ice is a good reflector of radiation.
What is radiative forcing
The energy requirement needed to maintain a sustained higher temperature,
expressed in Wm -2
Without the atmospheric greenhouse effect, the Earth would be
significantly cooler
Sea-level isotherms are
a set of lines of constant temperature for which observations have been
corrected for the height at which they were made.
Changes in temperature over the course of the year tend to follow the annual
changes in solar radiation received by about
A month
Why does Aberdeen receive less solar radiation than the equator at ground
level
The more oblique angle of the Sun and the longer atmospheric path light must
take to reach the surface at Aberdeen’s higher latitude means more solar
energy is absorbed before it reaches the earth’s surface
What instruments would you use to measure wind speed?
A Robinson’s cup anemomete
What is saturation vapour pressure
The vapour pressure where the rates of spontaneous condensation and
evaporation match
IR radiation emitted by clouds and the atmosphere?
keeps the Earth cooler than it would otherwise be
