What is the point, in an elliptical orbit, closest to the Sun or star of the orbiting object?
100
Johannes
What is Kepler's first name?
100
1642
What year was Isaac Newton born?
100
Eratosthenes
Who devised a way to measure the circumference of the spherical Earth?
100
Galilean satellites
What are the four most massive moons of Jupiter, discovered by Galileo in 1610?
200
Speed
What is a measure of how fast an object is moving?
200
Kepler's First Law
What states that the orbit of a planet about the Sun is an ellipse with the Sun at one focus?
200
Newton's First Law
What law states that an object remains at rest or moves in a straight line at a constant speed, unless acted upon by a net outside force?
200
Aristarchus
Who first proposed a method of determining the relative distances to the Sun and Moon?
200
Acceleration
What is the rate at which velocity changes?
300
Semi-major axis
What is half of the distance of the longest diameter of an ellipse (or the longest radius)?
300
Kepler's Second Law
What is the law of equal areas (line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal amounts of time)?
300
Newton's Second Law
What law states that the acceleration of an object is proportional to the net outside force acting on the object? F=ma
300
Ptolemy
Who developed a model of the solar system that attempted to explain retrograde motion?
400
Eccentricity
What is the measure of the elongation of an ellipse?
400
Kepler's Third Law
What is the law that states that the square of the sidereal period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of the orbit? P(squared)=a(cubed)
400
Newton's Third Law
What law states that whenever one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite force on the first object?
400
Copernicus
Who devised the first comprehensive Sun-centered model of the solar system?
400
e=.99
What is the measure of a very eccentric ellipse?
500
Synodic Period
What is the time that elapses between two successive identical configurations of a planet as seen from earth?
500
Tycho Brahe
Who provided the precise planetary position data used by Kepler?
500
Law of Universal Gravitation
What law states that two objects attract each other with a force that directly proportional to the mass of each object and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them?
500
Galileo
Who discovered that Venus exhibited phases like those of our Moon?
500
"A"
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