Introduction To Astronomy MCQs
Introduction To Astronomy MCQs
Our team has conducted extensive research to compile a set of Introduction To Astronomy MCQs. We encourage you to test your Introduction To Astronomy knowledge by answering these 90+ multiple-choice questions provided below.
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1: A spinning neutron star has been observed at the center of a ________.
A. Protostar.
B. Supernova remnant
C. Planetary nebula.
D. Red supergiant.
2: According to hubble's law, as the distance to galaxies ________, the ________ increases.
A. Increases; apparent recessional velocity
B. The greater the distance to a galaxy, the greater is the galaxy's redshift.
C. The number of logs used.
D. Emit large amounts of energy at all wavelengths.
3: An angle of 1 arcsecond is _________.
A. About the width of your fist held at arm's length
B. About the width of a finger held at arm's length
C. Less than the thickness of a human hair held at arm's length
D. Slightly more than the width of a basketball held at arm's length
4: Because of the conservation of angular momentum, as a star collapses ________.
A. It must rotate faster
B. What is considered High mass
C. Best way to detect a Black hole:
D. When two galaxies collide they tend to
5: Carbon fusion occurs in high-mass stars but not in low-mass stars because _________.
A. Only high-mass stars do fusion by the CNO cycle
B. Carbon fusion can occur only in the stars known as carbon stars
C. The cores of low-mass stars never get hot enough for carbon fusion
D. The cores of low-mass stars never contain significant amounts of carbon
6: Collisions between galaxies typically unfold over a period of ______.
A. Hundreds of millions of years.
B. 1 billion solar masses
C. Globular galaxies
D. 100 billion
7: Essentially all the hydrogen nuclei that will ever exist in our universe were created __________.
A. Spacetime rapidly expanded during a brief period of inflation.
B. Most matter in the early universe was annihilated by antimatter.
C. By the time the universe was about 3 minutes old
D. Fainter and has most of its photons at longer wavelengths
8: If we say that a galaxy has a lookback time of 1 billion years, we mean that _________.
A. It is now 1 billion light-years away.
B. It was 1 billion light-years away when the light left the galaxy.
C. It is 400 million years old.
D. Its light traveled through space for 1 billion years to reach us.
9: Overall, jupiter's composition is most like that of ________.
A. The Sun
B. Europa
C. Titan
D. Methane
10: The unusually bright centers found in some galaxies are called ________.
A. Active galactic nuclei.
B. 1 billion solar masses
C. Globular galaxies
D. The cosmological horizon
11: A terrestrial world's lithosphere is ________.
A. A core layer of molten, convecting material and sufficiently rapid rotation
B. A layer of relatively strong, rigid rock, encompassing the crust and part of the mantle
C. A place where a seafloor plate is sliding under a continental plate
D. A global
12: If you suspect someone you know may attempt suicide, you should __________.
A. All of the above
B. Feelings of euphoria
C. Help them talk through their issues
D. A suicide cluster occurs when multiple people attempt suicide at one time.
13: Current understanding holds that a galaxy's type (spiral, elliptical, or irregular) ______.
A. X rays
B. Visible light
C. Infrared light
D. Radio waves
14: According to hubble's law, the larger galaxy's redshift, the greater its _____.
A. Ounger it is.
B. Closer it is to us.
C. Faster it's approaching us.
D. Farther it is from us
15: Based on this diagram, "red sequence" galaxies are __________ than "blue cloud" galaxies.
A. A cluster of galaxies
B. About the size of our solar system.
C. The presence of globular clusters in the halos of galaxies
D. Redder and more luminous
16: A typical white dwarf is ________.
A. As massive as the Sun but only about as large in size as the Earth.
B. An object with gravity so strong that not even light can escape
C. Supernovas of very massive stars in distant galaxies
D. Both involve explosions on the surface of stellar corpse.
17: All ____ galaxies are spiral galaxies that have small luminous nuclei.
A. The gravitational lens effect
B. Seyfert
C. Emit a very large amount of energy per second
D. Most; a few percent
E. Synchrotron radiation
18: The graph shows that galaxies with high speeds as measured from earth are __________.
A. The more distant a galaxy, the faster it is moving away from us.
B. A type of luminous star that makes an excellent standard candle.
C. Moving away from Earth and are farther from Earth than galaxies with lower speeds
D. Its light traveled through space for 1 billion years to reach us
19: The main source of energy for a star as it grows in size to become a red giant is ______.
A. Protostar, main-sequence star, red giant, planetary nebula, white dwarf
B. Much less than half as long as the Sun
C. The core shrinks while the rest of the star expands.
D. Hydrogen fusion in a shell surrounding the central core
20: The processes responsible for virtually all surface geology are ________.
A. Impact cratering, volcanisms, tectonics, and erosion.
B. Seafloor crust is thinner, younger, and higher in density.
C. A greenhouse effect that keeps getting stronger until all of a planet's greenhouse gases are in its atmosphere
D. A layer of relatively strong, rigid rock, encompassing the crust and part of the mantle
21: The transit method allows us in principle to find planets around __________.
A. The astrometric technique of planet detection works best for
B. Their light is overwhelmed by the light from their star.
C. The amount and frequency of the star's motion are both higher.
D. Only a small fraction of stars that have planets
22: It is diffraction that limits the ________ of a telescope of a given objective diameter.
A. Resolution
B. Improve the angular resolution of radio telescopes
C. They have poorer angular resolution than a refractor
D. Increase their angular resolution and collect the very weak radio photons.
23: The cores of the terrestrial worlds are made mostly of metal because ______.
A. Metals sunk to the centers a long time ago when the interiors were molten throughout
B. The terrestrial worlds as a whole are made mostly of metal
C. The core contained lots of radioactive elements that decayed into metals
D. Over billions of years, convection gradually brought dense metals downward to the core
24: The velocities of seismic waves traveling from earthquake foci ________.
A. Are uniform throughout all layers of Earth
B. Decrease at a constant rate with depth
C. Increase at a constant rate with depth
D. Generally increase with depth, but occasionally make abrupt jumps
25: The light collecting area of a telescope is larger in telescopes which have a larger ____________.
A. Diameter
B. Light pollution
C. Reflecting
D. Focus
26: The surface features of ________ are known only through satellite radar mapping.
A. Jupiter
B. Mars
C. Venus
D. Mercury
27: To calculate the masses of stars in a binary system, we must measure their ________.
A. Spectral types and distance from Earth.
B. Absolute magnitudes and luminosities.
C. Luminosities and distance from Earth.
D. Orbital period and average orbital distance.
28: The largest geographic feature on the surface of planet earth is __________.
A. Pacific ocean
B. James Cook
C. Isostatic adjustment
D. None of these
29: A typical meteor is created by a particle about the size of a _________.
A. Pea
B. A large member of the Kuiper belt
C. Being a fragment from Comet Halley
D. Generally away from the Sun
E. Evidence of recent geological activity
30: Its massafter a supernova explosion, the remains of the stellar core ________.
A. May be either a neutron star or a black hole
B. Iron cannot release energy either by fission or fusion.
C. Its mass
D. All of this
31: Over time, the star-gas-star cycle leads the gas in the milky way to ________.
A. Have a lower abundance of heavy elements
B. Have a greater abundance of heavy elements
C. Become denser and hotter
D. Become denser and have a greater abundance of heavy elements
32: Spiral arms appear bright because ________.
A. They contain more hot young stars than other parts of the disk
B. The stars that formed first could orbit the center of the galaxy in any direction at any inclination.
C. It is by far the brightest source of visible light lying in the direction of the galactic center.
D. None of these
33: Stellar occultations are the most accurate way to measure the _________ of a solar system object.
A. Circumference
B. Radius
C. Density
D. Diameter
34: The james webb space telescope is designed primarily to observe __________.
A. Visible light
B. Light pollution
C. Ultraviolet light
D. Infrared light
35: We can study how galaxies evolve because ______.
A. Galaxies are transparent to visible light.
B. We are really smart astronomers.
C. We can watch as they interact in real time.
D. The farther away we look, the further back in time we see.
36: In essence, the kepler mission searched for extrasolar planets by ____________.
A. Monitoring stars for slight dimming that might occur as unseen planets pass in front of them
B. The size of the Doppler shift that we detect depends on the tilt of a planet's orbit.
C. A planet that is Jupiter-like in size but orbits very close to its star
D. None of these
37: Most pulsars are observed only as ________ sources.
A. Infrared
B. X-ray
C. Radio
D. Ultraviolet
38: Parallax measurements of the distances to the nearest stars use _____ as a baseline.
A. Top right
B. Earth's orbit
C. Moon's orbit
D. Earth's axis
39: The energy balance that contributes to the solar thermostat is a balance between __________.
A. The energy generated by fusion and the product of (mass lost through fusion) x c2
B. The energy reaching the Sun's photosphere and the energy radiated from the photosphere into space
C. The energy released in the core by fusion and the energy radiated from the Sun's surface into space
D. None of these
40: Radio telescopes would not represent a good choice for astronomical study of ________.
A. Ordinary stars
B. We don't know
C. In x rays.
D. In space
41: Radio telescopes measure the galaxys distribution of _____.
A. Whether a star is moving toward or away from earth
B. Refracting
C. Hydrogen from which stars are formed
D. Convection and radiation
E. Cooler than the rest of the surface
42: Craters on the surface of the moon are caused by the impact of _______________.
A. The sun
B. Meteoroids
C. The Earth
D. Water
43: Any place where groundwater naturally flows out of earths surface is termed a(n) ________.
A. The animation shows that any location on Earth
B. Passes through both tidal bulges
C. The places where the tides are smallest
D. Nonr of this
44: The energy in the atmospheres of most of the jovian planets comes ___________,
A. Almost entirely from their interiors
B. Almost entirely from the Sun
C. Both the Sun and their interiors, in roughly equal proportions
D. Tidal heating
45: Compared to the underlying photosphere and chromosphere, the corona is _____ in temperature.
A. Much larger
B. Much brighter
C. A prominence
D. Much hotter
46: Visible light from a distant star can be spread into a spectrum by using a glass prism or ______.
A. A diffraction grating.
B. Adaptive optics.
C. A telescope.
D. A flat glass mirror.
47: A ____ has a few million light sensitive diodes in an array typically about a half-inch square.
A. Photometer
B. Charge-coupled device
C. Spectrograph
48: The great contribution of nicholas copernicus was to ________.
A. Discover the laws of planetary motion
B. Discover the law of gravity
C. Create a detailed model of our solar system with the Sun rather than Earth at the center
D. Prove that the Earth is not the center of the universe
49: Degenearcy pressure arises when ________.
A. Subatomic particles are packed as tightly as the laws of quantum mechanics allow
B. The merger of two black holes
C. Electron dengeneracy pressure
D. All of this
50: A main-sequence star twice as massive as the sun would last __________.
A. As a main sequence star
B. Much less than half as long as the Sun
C. In hydrostatic equilibrium
D. Hydrogen burning shell expands
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