Astro History
The person who put forth the heliocentric model of the Universe
Who is Nicolaus Copernicus?
Light sometimes behaves as a wave and sometimes as this
This law says that an object in motion tends to stay and motion, and an object at rest tends to stay at rest
What is Newton's First Law of Motion
This is a device that collects light and brings it to a focus
What is a telescope?
What is the photosphere?
This is the most energetic type of electromagnetic radiation
What are gamma rays?
The square of a planet's period is proportional to this
What is the cube of the semi-major axis?
This is the property of light that it gets bent when traveling through matter
What is refraction?
This is the hottest layer of the Sun's atmosphere
What is the corona?
Who is John Dalton?
For blackbody radiation, a higher temperature means the wavelength at which the spectrum peaks is this
What is shorter?
The Greeks decided that the Earth could not be moving around the Sun because they did not find evidence for this phenomenon
What is parallax?
This is the name of the effect of light passing through turbulent parts of the atmosphere and getting distorted
What is seeing?
These are caused when the solar wind or coronal mass ejections from the Sun interacts with Earth's magnetic field
What are auroras?
This woman classified hundreds of thousands of spectra as one of Pickering's "Harvard Computers" and came up with the current ordering of spectral classes: OBAFGKM
Who is Annie Jump Cannon
If you shine a source of white light (like blackbody radiation) through a cool, tenuous gas, you get this type of spectrum
What is an absorption spectrum?
If I have an object with a volume of 750 cm3 and a mass of 1.5 kg, this is its density in units of g/cm3
What is 2?
These three parts of the electromagnetic spectrum must be observed from space
What are X-ray, gamma-ray, and ultraviolet?
This is the cause of the Sun's solar cycle
What is the periodic reversal of the Sun's magnetic field?
This woman's PhD thesis, considered one of the most impressive dissertations to ever be done, showed that the composition of the atmospheres of the Sun and most stars is primarily hydrogen and helium
Who is Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin
Suppose a star has a radius twice that of the Sun and a temperature twice that of the Sun. This is how many times brighter is it than the Sun.
What is 64?
Suppose there are two objects at a distance of 3 meters that exert a gravitational force of 4 Newtons. This is the force (in Newtons) the objects would exert on each other if they were placed at a distance of 1 meter apart.
What is 36?
This somewhat defunct type of detector receives photons that each eject an electron that goes through a voltage, increasing the number of electrons and greatly enhancing a current that gets measured
What is a photomultiplier tube (PMT)?
These are small cells covering the photosphere caused by convection under the surface
What are granules?