Quiz 8 Flashcards
One of the peculiar features about Uranus is that:
It is tipped on its side about 98 degrees.
Neptune, named after the god of the sea, appears what color in a telescope?
Blue.
According to the official statement by the International Astronomical Union, is Pluto a planet?
No, Pluto is not a planet.
The asteroids are now thought to have formed because:
Jupiter’s great gravity ripped apart a planet that was trying to form there.
The best way to describe comets is:
Dirty snowballs.
Because of the solar wind, the tails of comets always point:
Away from the Sun.
When a comet orbits the Sun many times it looses its icy materials, leaving behind a ring of silicate rock the size of sand grains orbiting the Sun. If this ring crosses the Earth’s path, the Earth can run into the stream of sand grains on specific days of the years creating shooting stars. This produce days in the year when many shooting stars can be seen. These events are called:
Meteor showers.
The most currently accepted theory of what caused the dinosaurs to become extinct is:
A large asteroid impact.
Life as we know it on Earth is based on what element?
Carbon.
In 1953, University of Chicago researchers, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey took simple chemicals (thought to be present in on Earth when it first formed) like water, methane, ammonia and carbon dioxide, and placed then into a sterile closed glass tube. They then created sparks in the tube and shined ultraviolet light into the tube to power chemical reactions. The results of this experiment, which have been duplicated many times, were:
That simple chemicals, all on their own, combined to form amino acids, which are the chemical building blocks of most life on Earth that we understand. But never yet life itself.
