In the email arrived this crafty piece of temptation:
As soon as I read that “Hardly anyone can name these 10 countries. Can you?” I knew that I was going to take the quiz and score a hundred percent (as you probably will) and thought: Good idea. So here’s a quiz, which may not be quite so easy, and won’t end in a fundraising appeal.
(Try first without googling.)
(1) What’s this constellation?
(2) How many official constellations are there, and how many constellation pieces would it take to make a jigsaw puzzle map of the entire celestial sphere?
(3) What star has the same name as an ancient Roman general?
(4) Which is hotter, a blue giant star or a red giant star?
Red supergiant Betelgeuse, compared with the Sun. An illustration from Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, a Longer View.
(5) What is the defining way in which dwarf planets differ from planets? (Discussed in the same book.)
(6) How does a parsec differ from a light-year?
(7) Which planets did Voyager 2 visit?
(8) Who said “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”?
(9) You’ve heard of Kepler’s three Laws of planetary motion; you certainly have, if you’ve ever taken an astronomy course, which I haven’t. But what is Kepler’s Equation? (Roughly – what is it for, what does it do? It’s not as simple as Newton’s F = ma or Einstein’s E = mc(squared).)
(10) How did you score with Reprieve’s quiz?
(5) What is the defining way in which dwarf planets differ from planets?
Dwarf planets were defined by the International Astronomical Union. A dwarf planet is big enough to be interesting to a planetary scientist, but too small for the members of an obscure IAU subcommittee to take seriously.
So far as I know, the planetary scientist don’t have a single professional organization. If they did, perhaps they would decide that red dwarfs aren’t really stars.
[/sarcasm]
Got all but general. 10 on human rights quiz. Nice segue- I was going to reiterate my expectation that this was an astronomy blog. But since I have 90% of your books, I know I should expect occasional political sidetracks.
Nice quiz Guy. Here are my answers:
1. Draco
2. 88 constelations, 89 jigsaw puzzle pieces. Serpens is divided in two parts (Serpens caput and Serpens cauda, head and tail) by Ophiucus.
3. Don’t know. Must look it up!
4. Giant blue stars are hotter. The hottest stars, indeed.
5. Dwarf planets do not have big enough mass to clear up its orbital vicinity from other smaller bodies, as regular planets do.
6. 1 parsec = 3.262 l.y. It is the distance to an object that shows a paralax of 1 arc-second on a 1 A.U. base.
7. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
8. Sir Isaac Newton.
9. Don’t remember the equation, but the second law says that the sun-planet vector sweeps equal areas in equal amounts of time.
10. 10 out of 10.
Since some people have already answered some questions, I am just going to answer some of the questions that have not yet been answered or I know the answers are not correct.
2. 88 official constellations.
5. I will give this a try – a dwarf planet has enough gravity to be spherical or a spheriod, is not a satellite of a planet, and has not cleared its orbital area from other major bodies. The second requirement is particularly interesting since the Moon, all 4 Galilean satellites, Titan, and Triton which are larger than most or all dwarf planets, and many other satellites like Rhea, the 4 largest Uranian moons and so on would be planets or dwarf planets.
7. I sense a trick question here regarding flybys. I know Voyager 2 visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, but did it use Venus or Earth for a gravity assist to speed it up like many other spacecrafts do, and does that count as a visit?
9. I can’t give the math off the top of my head but I know it says planets sweep out equal areas in equal times. That is why planets move faster when closer to the Sun than when further away, and why on Earth Spring and Summer are longer in the current era (about 93 days each) than Fall and Winter (about 90 days each) since Earth is closest to the Sun in early January.
10. I got all 10. I will admit that I did not know all 10 by sight but some of them I was able too get by knowing it is not choice A or choice B, so it has to be choice C.
1) Draco (circumpolar constellation… safe place for a dragon)
2) About 90
3) Marcus Valerius Corvus
4) Blue giant, also called a blue white star. An example is Sirius.
6) Parsec is a parallax of one arc second, about 3.26 light years
8) Isaac Newton
10) Eight out of 10. I didn’t know that the US is among the top 10 cruelest countries in the world.
No time for further research. Thanks for helping me brush up on astronomy.
Good work, Rick. For 2 I’d say 88 constellations, but 89 pieces since Serpens is split in 2 pieces. And for 3, Corvus is a constellation, not a star, right. I didn’t know the answer, but Wikipedia lists a general “Marcus Atilius Regulus” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_generals
For 5 I’d say planets clear their orbits (despite a very recent paper that still doesn’t like that concept). and for 9, I think [omitted after checking]. But I’m wrong, I was thinking of Kepler’s 2nd law. For the answer, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler%27s_equation
You’re right. Corvus is a constellation. When I viewed the “All The Sky” star chart in my Astro Calendar, I thought Corvus was a star. Now i realize that that the constellation names are in Caps and the star names are in lower case.
I still may be right… Corvus Alpha, Corvus Beta, etc. could be considered as stars named for the Roman general. I looked at the same Wikipedia list as you did when I was trying to find the answer. Don’t know how I missed Marcus Regulus. Maybe I perused the “A” category too quickly thinking that the odds would be low that the answer would be near the top of the list.
7/9 on your questions. I had to search for Kepler’s equation, and even the internet couldn’t tell me which star is eponymous with a Roman general.
10/10 on the geography atrocity quiz. Do you know if the rankings are by absolute numbers of executions or per capita? (Using the phrase “per capita” when referring to executions is somewhat grisly, but I can’t think of an alternative.)
I think they must be the top ten per capita, since countries such as Singapore and Jordan have small populations compared with China and the USA. You’re right, this should have been made clear by the designers of the appeal.
If China is number one per capita, that amounts to genocide. But I don’t think it would be logistically possible for Singapore to be in the top ten in absolute numbers.
If we’re going to be very literal, Saudi Arabia would be number one in per capita capital punishments.
Wonderful questions. I think I got 8 out of 10, but need to do some checking.
Here’s a suggested question of my own:
What bright star is near the “apex of the Sun’s way” – the path of the sun with respect to the average flow of nearby stars (the “Local Standard of Rest”?
Note that while checking to make sure that I really did understand the right answer to my proposed question, I ran across the fact that our recent interstellar visitor, Oumuamua, appeared to come from roughly the same direction that we are headed towards, and has “a hyperbolic excess velocity (velocity at infinity, ) of 26.33 km/s, its speed relative to the Sun when in interstellar space.”, compared to our relative motion of closer to 20 km/s (but the Wikipedia talk page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Solar_apex#Sources_and_consensus) gives some wildly different values – what’s going on?). That says to me that the apex of Oumuamua’s way is somewhere in the other direction (I haven’t dug in to exactly where), at a rather slower pace, which was redirected by an angle of about 66 degrees. And it is perhaps more descriptive to say that the sun overtook it as both were drifting among the nearby stars.
I know you’ve covered Oumuamua’s journey before to some degree at http://www.universalworkshop.com/2017/12/24/oumuamua/
but not their motion relative to other nearby stars.
And the answers are …. ?
I should have said that I’ll inform you of the correct answers and therefore of your scores, by means of a new post, after all answers (answers) appear to be in.