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1 | |
How many stars are there in the Solar System? |
| | A) | 0 |
| | B) | 1 |
| | C) | 9 |
| | D) | 100 billion |
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2 | |
What are the third, fifth and seventh planets in order of increasing distance from the Sun? |
| | A) | Venus, Earth, Jupiter |
| | B) | Earth, Jupiter, Uranus |
| | C) | Mercury, Mars, Saturn |
| | D) | Mars, Jupiter, Neptune |
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3 | |
All planets spin in the same direction except for |
| | A) | Mercury, Earth, and Jupiter. |
| | B) | Venus, Mars, and Saturn. |
| | C) | Venus, Uranus, and Pluto. |
| | D) | Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto. |
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4 | |
Which of the following is an outer planet? |
| | A) | Earth |
| | B) | Jupiter |
| | C) | Mars |
| | D) | Venus |
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5 | |
Which of the following is not a property of the outer planets (excluding Pluto)? |
| | A) | They all have solid surfaces for spacecraft to land on. |
| | B) | They are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. |
| | C) | They all have rings. |
| | D) | They are all far more massive than the Earth. |
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6 | |
A planet's average density is equal to its __ divided by its __. |
| | A) | mass, surface area |
| | B) | volume, mass |
| | C) | mass, volume |
| | D) | mass, radius |
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7 | |
What do we call the swarm of comet nuclei in a huge shell surrounding the Sun and planets? |
| | A) | The Solar System |
| | B) | The asteroid belt |
| | C) | The ecliptic. |
| | D) | The Oort Cloud. |
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8 | |
Approximately how old is the Solar System? |
| | A) | 4.5 thousand years. |
| | B) | 4.5 million years. |
| | C) | 4.5 billion years. |
| | D) | 4.5 trillion years. |
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9 | |
A huge interstellar cloud collapsed into a rotating disk with a central bulge. What was this? |
| | A) | The disk was the solar nebula and the bulge became Jupiter. |
| | B) | A large belt containing asteroids in a gap between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. |
| | C) | The disk was the solar nebula and the bulge became the Sun. |
| | D) | The formed the outer planets which eventually met up with the Sun. |
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10 | |
Which of the following features of the Solar System does the solar nebula hypothesis explain? |
| | A) | All the planets orbit the Sun in the same direction. |
| | B) | All the planets' orbits lie in nearly the same plane. |
| | C) | The planets nearest the Sun contain only small amounts of substances that condense at low temperatures. |
| | D) | All of the above. |
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11 | |
One reason the planets near the sun are composed mainly of rock and iron may be that |
| | A) | the Sun's magnetic field attracted all the iron into the region around the Sun. |
| | B) | the Sun's heat made it difficult for ices and gases to condense near it. |
| | C) | the Sun's gravity sucked in iron and heavy material and the lighter materials floated farther away. |
| | D) | the Sun is made mostly of iron, so the planets nearest it are formed of iron. |
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12 | |
How do we know the interior composition of Jupiter? |
| | A) | Astronomers examined Jupiter's spectrum. |
| | B) | Astronomers studied earthquake waves using instruments on Jupiter's surface. |
| | C) | Astronomers calculated Jupiter's average density and compared it to those of abundant candidate materials, taking gravitational compression into account. |
| | D) | All of the above. |
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13 | |
What are planetesimals? |
| | A) | Very small planets. |
| | B) | Satellites of the giant planets. |
| | C) | Planets that are found orbiting other stars. |
| | D) | Large chunks of material (1 mm to several km in size) from which the planets were formed. |
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14 | |
How did the planetary moons form? |
| | A) | The moons probably formed from planetesimals orbiting the growing planets. |
| | B) | Most of the moons likely were “captured” as they wandered too close to the planets. |
| | C) | Many of the moons formed from material spewed out of volcanoes. |
| | D) | Both b and c. |
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15 | |
How do astronomers discover planets orbiting a star beyond the Sun? |
| | A) | They can see the planet reflecting the star's light. |
| | B) | They can be detected by the slight gravitational tug that they exert on their parent stars. |
| | C) | They have bounced radar off of them. |
| | D) | So far, no planets have been discovered around any other stars. |
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