Characteristics of Stars
Patterns of stars in the sky
What are constellations?
A large cloud of gas and dust
What is a nebula?
A group of two or more stars
What is a star system?
The matter in a galaxy that astronomers cannot see directly; it also does not give off electromagnetic radiation
What is dark matter?
The brightness of a star as seen from Earth
What is apparent brightness?
A light-year is a measure of this
What is distance?
The earliest stage of a stars "life"
What is a protostar?
A star system in which one star blocks the light from another star
What is an eclipsing binary?
The theory that the universe was created in an instant, billions of years ago, from a large explosion
What is the big bang theory?
The process that has to occur in a protostar in order for a star to be "born"
What is nuclear fusion?
This term means how bright a star would be if it were a standard distance from Earth
What is absolute brightness?
A spinning neutron star that appears to produce pulses of radio waves
What are pulsars?
A star system containing two stars
What is a binary star?
The galaxies are moving in this way
The apparent change in position of an object when you look at it from different places; astronomers use this to measure distances to stars
What is parallax?
The two characteristics of stars that are graphed in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram
What is a star's absolute brightness and temperature?
How long a star "lives" depends on this
What is its mass?
The two types of star clusters
What are open clusters and globular clusters?
A type of galaxy with a black hole at the center
What is a quasar?
Write the following number in scientific notation:
8,600,000,000,000
What is 8.6 * 1012?
Parallax cannot be used on a star if it is
a. too close
b. too bright
c. too far away
d. too large
What is C, too far away?
When a star runs out of fuel, it can become one of these three things
What is a neutron star, a black hole, or a black dwarf?
Scientists use this to write very large or very small numbers in shorter form
What is scientific notation?
The force that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate
What is dark energy?
TWO PART QUESTION
The name and type of the galaxy we live in
What is the Milky Way and a [barred] spiral galaxy?