DISQUS

Broadband Politics: Astronomy survey

  • Ken Layne · 7 years ago
    Richard - I can answer them all without consulting a book/search engine ... but am I right? (I'm not sure about the "how much longer" part of question #7, and "long enough for my purposes" probably wouldn't impress a teacher.)
  • Dodd · 7 years ago
    Agreed. I can answer all of them except why people born on the Ides of March are assigned to Pisces (and I have an answer for that, I'm just not sure if it's what the question is asking for). Are you going to post the answers?
  • David Perron · 7 years ago
    What in the name of doG is astrology doing in there? I thought this was about scientific literacy. Here's my answers:

    1) David, age 41, engineer.
    2) Gemini, for whatever it's worth. Something to do with the constellation Gemini being at a certain place in the night sky, although this is not really either astrology OR astronomy.
    3) Neither. They orbit a common center of gravity, which happens to be very close to the center of the sun.
    4) much farther
    5) much farther
    6) five billion years or older.
    7) Depends on what you mean by "last forever". More than likely it'll wind up being a cold cinder eventually. Some of the mass will still be there; does that mean it lasted forever?
    8) Energy is currently (mostly) produced from hydrogen fusion. This will eventually change.
    9) A satellite will continue to orbit as long as it has enough fuel on board to compensate for drag and other perturbations. "what keeps it up" on a second-to-second basis is the fact that its centripetal acceleration of orbital motion is equal to gravity, loosely speaking.
    10) Both a really good candy bar, and a group of billions of stars (orbiting a common center of gravity) called a galaxy.

    Or were those rhetorical questions?