YERKES
This famous astronomer at Yerkes is the namesake for the upper limit on the mass of a stable white dwarf star, around 1.4 solar masses
Who is Chandrasekhar?
This nearly uniform glow of radiation, accidentally discovered in 1965, is the faint afterglow of the Big Bang
What is the Cosmic Microwave Background?
This notation for writing numbers popularized by Leibniz was featured on the Voyager’s Golden Record, written with horizontal and vertical lines.
What is binary?
This equation estimates the number of planets in the galaxy that have life, and later served as a basis for the Fermi paradox.
What is the Drake Equation?
This feature distinguishes the two subclasses of spiral galaxies.
What is a bar?
The town in which Yerkes Observatory is located
Where is Williams Bay, Wisconsin?
The is the point of no return around a black hole, beyond which not even light can escape
What is the Event Horizon?
This law states that a planet covers the same area of space in the same amount of time no matter where it is in its orbit
What is Kepler's 2nd law
This region of the solar system discovered in the late 90s is home to large, icy planetesimals, as well as dwarf planets such as Pluto.
What is the Kuiper Belt?
This spectral emission line, with a wavelength of 1215 Å, is emitted by hydrogen atoms as part of the photoelectric effect.
What is Lyman-α?
This type of element was used in the emulsion on the glass plate images taken with the telescopes at Yerkes
What is silver?
This spectral line is used to show the distribution of neutral hydrogen throughout the Milky Way galaxy
What is the 21cm line?
In special relativity, this number notated by γ is the factor by which space and time are dilated when moving at a given velocity.
What is the Lorentz factor?
The discovery of this dwarf planet in 2005 set off a chain reaction that led to Pluto’s reclassification the following year.
What is Eris?
Mathematician Terrence Tao popularized the name for this series of distance measurements in space, in which measuring one distance allows you to calculate a different, larger distance.
What is the cosmic distance ladder?
Astronomy undergraduates staying at Yerkes and physics undergraduates in Chicago got into an extended feud, stealing back and forth this piece of furniture
What is a foosball table
The theorem that states that black holes (stationary black hole solutions) can only be characterized by their mass, angular momentum, and electric charge
What is the no-hair theorem/black hole uniqueness theorem?
What is the name of the set of 2 ODEs that govern the expansion of space (homogenous and isotropic).
What are the Friedmann equations?
Proposed in 2016, this hypothesized planet's gravitational effects could explain the peculiar clustering of orbits of bodies beyond neptune
What is Planet 9?
The percentage of incident photons that a CCD can convert into electrons.
What is quantum efficiency?
This atlas was started by E.E. Barnard, completed by his niece Mary R. Calvert, and published in 1927
What is a photographic atlas of selected regions of the Milky Way?
The spectral distortion or anisotropies of the CMB due to inverse Compton scattering from foreground galaxy clusters
What is the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect (or SZ effect)
This once-accepted “law” falsely proposed that planets in the solar system were distributed according to a logarithmic pattern, leading to speculation of a planet between Mars and Jupiter.
What is the Titius-Bode Law?
This phenomenon occurs when two orbiting bodies become locked in a ratio of orbital periods such that their gravitational interactions reinforce each other, stabilizing their orbits; it is responsible for features like the gaps in Saturn’s rings and the orbital relationships among Jupiter’s moons Io, Europa, and Ganymede.
What is orbital resonance?
A Dilution Refrigerator is a cryogenic device used for telescope detectors that can cool to temperatures as low as 2mK. This process of cooling is a result of the repeated mixing and separation of isotopes this element.
What is Helium?
(Helium-3 and Helium-4)