Ch. 12 Practice Test Questions – Flashcards

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question
Which of the following statements best describes the size of the largest asteroid, Ceres?
answer
It is a little less than half the diameter of our Moon.
question
If we could put all the asteroids together, their total mass would be ______.
answer
much less than the mass of any terrestrial planet
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Why didn't a planet form where the asteroid belt is now located?
answer
Gravitational tugs from Jupiter prevented material from collecting together to form a planet.
question
Gaps in the asteroid belt (often called Kirkwood gaps) are caused by ______.
answer
orbital resonances with Jupiter
question
When you see the bright flash of a meteor, what are you actually seeing?
answer
the glow from a pea-size particle and the surrounding air as the particle burns up in our atmosphere
question
How can we determine the reflectivity of an asteroid?
answer
By comparing its brightness in visible light to its brightness in infrared light.
question
In science fiction movies, spaceships are often shown dodging through large numbers of closely spaced, boulder-size objects. Which of the following real things in our solar system would look most like such science fiction dangers?
answer
the rings of Saturn
question
Suppose you find a meteorite made almost entirely of metal. According to current science, which of the following statements must be true?
answer
Your meteorite is a fragment from the core of a large asteroid that shattered in a collision.
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Which of the following objects are probably not located in the same region of the solar system in which they originally formed?
answer
Oort cloud comets
question
Suppose there were no solar wind. How would the appearance of a comet in our inner solar system be different?
answer
It would have only one tail instead of two.
question
Suppose we discover a new comet on an orbit that brings it closer to the Sun than Mercury every 125 years. What can we conclude?
answer
It has been on its current orbit for only a very short time compared to the age of our solar system.
question
When we see a meteor shower, it means that _________.
answer
Earth is crossing the orbit of a comet
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Which of the following is not a piece of evidence supporting the idea that an impact caused the mass extinction that occurred 65 million years ago?
answer
Fossilized dinosaur bones contain fragments of rock from the impact.
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Suppose that large jovian planets had never formed in our solar system. Which of the following would most likely be true?
answer
Neither the asteroid belt nor Oort cloud would exist.
question
Which of the following statements is not true?
answer
Objects in the Kuiper belt are made mostly of rock and metal.
question
A rock found on Earth that crashed down from space is called ______.
answer
a meteorite
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The asteroid belt is located ______.
answer
between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter
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Which statement about asteroids is not true?
answer
If we could put all the asteroids together, they would make an object about the size of Earth.
question
A typical meteor is created by a particle about the size of a _________.
answer
pea
question
What do we mean by a primitive meteorite?
answer
a meteorite that is essentially unchanged since it first condensed and accreted in the solar nebula some 4.6 billion years ago
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Among discovered meteorites, we have found some with all the following origins except _________.
answer
being a fragment from Comet Halley
question
Which statement is not thought to be true of all comets in our solar system?
answer
Comets always have tails.
question
Which direction do a comet's dust and plasma tails point?
answer
generally away from the Sun
question
When a comet passes near the Sun, part of it takes on the appearance of a large, bright ball from which the tail extends. This part is called _____.
answer
the coma
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The total number of comets orbiting the Sun is estimated to be about ______.
answer
1 trillion
question
Halley's comet is named after the English scientist Edmund Halley (1656--1742) because ______.
answer
he calculated its orbit and predicted the year in which it would next be seen.
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What was the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact?
answer
the 1994 impact of a chain of comet fragments into Jupiter
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What do we mean by a mass extinction?
answer
the extinction of a large fraction of the world's plant and animal species in a relatively short period of time
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If the hypothesis tracing the extinction of the dinosaurs to an impact is correct, the dinosaurs died off largely because ______.
answer
of global climate effects initiated by dust and smoke that entered the atmosphere after the impact
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