P7 Revision Questions
P7 Revision Questions
P7 Revision Questions
P7.3 What are the objects that we see in the night sky and how far away are
they?
1. How does parallax make some stars seem to move relative to others
over the course of a year?
2. What is the definition of the parallax angle of a star?
3. How does the parallax angel relate to the distance of the stars?
4. What term is give to the distance to a star with a parallax angle of
one second of arc?
5. How does parsecs relate to light years?
6. How many parsecs are typical interstellar distances (e.g. 1, 10, 100,
1000)?
7. What does the brightness of a star depend on?
8. Why does the brightness as it appears to us depend on its distance
from us?
9. What are Cepheid variable stars and how does this allow astronomers
to estimate the distance to Cepheid variable stars?
10. How has the observations of Cepheid variable stars helped establish
the scale of the Universe and the nature of most nebulas?
11. What is the milky way and how do we know this?
12. What did astronomers originally think the fuzzy objects that they
could see in the night sky were?
13. What were the main issues in the Curtis-Shapley debate?
14. How did Hubble’s observations of Cepheid variables help resolve this
debate?
15. What units are used to measure intergalactic distances?
16. How has the Cepheid variable data in distance galaxies given accurate
values of the Hubble constant?
17. Give the equation to calculate the speed of recession and the units.
http://www.sumanasinc.com/webcontent/animations/content/moonphase.htm
l
(Phases of the moon)
http://www.sumanasinc.com/webcontent/animations/astronomy.html
(other animations including black body and nearest stars)
http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us/gbssci/Phys/Class/refrn/u14l5b.html
(Physics classroom, lens tutorial)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax
(simple explanation of parallax)
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/astro101/java/parallax/parallax.htm
l
(animation showing how stars seem to move)
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/mysteries_l1/cepheid.html
(explanation of Cepheid Variable stars)
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/diamond_jubilee/1920/cs_why.html
(quick overview of the Curtis-Shapley debate)
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/astro/hubble.html
(Hubbles constant and expanding universe)
http://aspire.cosmic-ray.org/labs/star_life/starlife_proto.html
(Protostar)