Planets: Is there life beyond Earth?
Can you work at NASA while in college?
Yes. The NASA internship program is available to students in college.
What is the difference between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission?
Nuclear fission: taking a large radioactive element like plutonium and splitting it into smaller pieces, releasing massive amounts of energy.
Nuclear fusion: smashing small elements together to create a larger element and release ludicrous amounts of energy.
What object will the Sun become after it runs out of fuel?
A white dwarf.
Is the universe static, expanding, or contracting?
Expanding.
What does the word wavelength mean?
Wavelength is the distance between adjacent peaks of a light wave.
Name the planets of the solar system moving outwards from the Sun.
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
If stars are brighter and bigger, they’re going to have to burn their fuel faster to maintain their size and luminosity. Brighter stars die faster.
What defines the event horizon of a black hole?
The event horizon is the position after which even light cannot escape the black hole.
What shape is the universe (approximately)?
Flat!
Why do stars move over the course of the night?
What is the difference between a terrestrial planet and a gas giant?
Terrestrial planets are those that are primarily rocky. Gas giants may have a rock core but are much larger with extended atmospheres made primarily of hydrogen and helium.
Why are different stars different colors?
The difference in color and, more prominently, spectral features, is caused by the difference in temperature of the objects.
Have any planets been detected around the objects that form after stars die?
Yes! More are potentially incoming with JWST.
What branch of math does the parallax technique primarily rely on (e.g. algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus)?
Trigonometry. Astronomical parallax comes from inferring the distance to a distant object from the angular change in its position on the sky and the distance from the Earth and Sun. It's ultimately a SOH-CAH-TOA problem!
What is redshift/the Doppler effect?
As a wave moves outward from something moving towards you, the wavefronts get bunched together, increasing their frequency or shortening their wavelength. As the object moves away, the opposite happens. Shorter wavelength visible light is blue and longer is red so we call this process blueshifting and redshifting. The Doppler effect is another name.
What defines the habitable zone?
The habitable zone is the region around a star where the planet is not too hot or not too cold for water to be a liquid on the surface of the star.
Is a magnitude 0 star or a magnitude 10 star brighter?
Magnitude 0.
Can you observe something falling into a black hole?
No. As an object falls towards a black hole's event horizon, time will slow infinitely so that it will never appear to cross.
What is the difference between homogeneity and isotropy?
Homogenous: no preferred location in the universe. Every point is the same.
Isotropic: there is no preferred direction in the universe. From any point, the surroundings look the same.
Why does the Earth have seasons?
Due to the tilt of the planet relative to the sun, different areas of the planet receive different concentrations of sunlight at different times of the year.
What is a primary goal of the Europa Clipper mission?
The mission designed to see if Europa has the conditions necessary to host a life bearing environment.
Where does most of the material we are made of come from?
What causes a neutron star to pulse?
What is the Hubble tension?
Values for the expansion rate of the universe (the Hubble constant) differ between cosmic microwave background measurements and those using the distance ladder.
What is the difference between spectrometry and photometry?
Spectrometers measure light intensity at specific wavelengths. Photometers measure light intensity averaged over a range of wavelengths.