AoTATX #73

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Play tonight's trivia game here: AoTATX #73 trivia

AoTATX #72

El martes 22 de septiembre, 2020  (Tuesday, September 22)

1. El agujero negro de la vía láctea es ...  un agujero negro supermasivo.
2. ¿De qué tamaño sería un agujero negro con la masa de la tierra?  Del tamaño de una pelota de tenis
3. ¿De qué tamaño sería un agujero negro con la masa del sol?  Del tamaño de una montaña
4. ¿Cuáles estrellas acaban su vida como agujeros negros?  Las estrellas gigantes
5. ¿Cuál molécula encontraron en la atmósfera de Venus?  Fosfina
6. ¿Cuál tipo de estrella encontraron el espiral los astrónomos de la UNAM?  Wolf-Rayet
7. ¿En cuántos planetas sabemos que hay vida?  Uno (la Tierra)
8. ¿Cómo se les llama a las "pruebas de vida" que los científicos buscan tanto en la Tierra como en otros mundos?  Biofirmas o biomarcadores
9. ¿Cuáles son algunas de las disciplinas que integran el campo de la astrobiología?  Física, microbiología, geología, ciencias planetarias, astrofísica
10. ¿En qué parte de Encélado, Europa y Titán piensan los astrobiólogos que podria existir vida?  En océanos internos
11. ¿Qué buscará la misión Perserverancia a Marte?  Signos de vida pasada ("fósiles")
12. Aproximadamente, ¿cuántos planetas extrasolares se conocen en 2020?  Poco más de 4 mil

AoTATX #71

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

1. Which is geological evidence of a meteor impact?  Tektites
2. How can we redirect an asteroid away from Earth?  All of the above (Ram it, Tow it, Shine light on it)
3. What does CME stand for?  Coronal Mass Ejection
4. Which is a supernova remnant?  Crab Nebula
5. What native peoples inhabited Chaco Canyon?  Anasazi
6. What were the Polynesian sailors called?  Wayfinders
7. Where is Teotihuacan located?  Mexico
8. What type of henge accompanied Stonehenge?  Wood
9. What did the airshafts point to in the pyramids?  Stars/Constellations
10. What does "infrared" mean?  Below red
11. In infrared images, the sky is __ magnitudes brighter than high redshift science targets.  10
12. When will the James Webb Space Telescope be launched?  October 31, 2021

AoTATX #70

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

1. From Earth, Webb could detect the heat signature of a bumble bee on the moon. How far from Earth could Webb detect the heat signature of a pound of bumble bees (approximately 4000 bees)? (Excuse the weird units, but hey this IS astronomy)  Saturn  (~840 million miles)
2. Why is High-Contrast Infrared Direct Imaging useful when probing young star systems?   Young star systems have planets that have retained remnant heat from planetary formation.
3. Why can terms like "Earth-like" and "habitable" be misleading? (Although maybe not be for long, thank you JWST :) )  Both options #1 and #2 
   (#1 - The most we can conclude about "Earth-like" planets, without understanding their atmospheres, is that they are "Earth-sized" planets.
   #2 - The habitability for an individual planet depends heavily on the atmospheric composition and a wide variety of factors specific to that planet)
4. What's the Habitable Zone (HZ) of a planetary system?  The region where water can exist in liquid form on a planet.
5. Which detection technique has found the most planets in the HZ to date?   Radial Velocity
6. Is K2-18b likely to be an inhabited planet?   Likely not
7. What is the current best observational technique to observe exoplanet atmospheres?   Transmission Spectroscopy
8. What does MCMC stand for?   Markov chain Monte Carlo
9. What's the big spherical region surrounding the disk of a spiral galaxy called?   Halo
10. Which is easier: a spectrum, or a spectral energy distribution (SED)?   A spectral energy distribution

AoTATX #69

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

1. Why is Venus the hottest planet in our Solar System despite being further away from the Sun than Mercury? Its thick atmosphere traps heat, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect.
2. What about Mars's atmospheric composition makes "terraforming" it difficult? There is not enough sunlight and there is no magnetic field.
3. Why is Uranus on its side? A long time ago it collided with an Earth-sized object.
4. Which planet has the most violent and extreme weather in the Solar System? Neptune
5. Which planet experiences aurorae similar to Earth? Jupiter
6. Where is the most "Earth-like" place in the Solar System (besides Earth itself)? Titan
7. Is Pluto a planet? No (we would also accept: Always in my heart)
8. Which NASA 'Hidden Figure' is the new namesake for NASA HQ? Mary Jackson
9. What fraction of exoplanets could be ocean worlds like Europa and Enceladus? More than 1/4
10. How old are the two Brown Dwarfs TOI-569b and TOI-1406b? More than 3 billion years old

AoTATX #68

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

1. Which of the following is an Umbrella Term that encompasses the others? Artificial Intelligence
2. What were the women who started working at Harvard Observatory in 1875 and who helped lay out some of the fundamental assumptions of astronomy called? Human "Computers"
3. What can the massive and compact objects in X-ray Binaries be? Black Holes, Pulsars, or Non-Pulsing Neutron Stars
4. One of the most widely used and simplest machine learning algorithms has the acronym KNN which stands for ____. K Nearest Neighbors
5. What causes noise and makes it challenging to discover smaller and smaller planets similar to our earth? Stellar Activity (Spots)
6. Lyman-alpha photons originate from which of the following elements? Hydrogen
7. What type of stars are the main source of Lyman-alpha emission? O & B
8. What units does redshift have? Trick question! It's unitless
9. Gravitational lensing describes the process where: the path of light from a distant object is bent by a very massive object's gravitational field.
10. As a galaxy moves towards us, how does its light appear to us? Bluer
11. Which stars become white dwarfs? About 97% of all stars
12. Are binary stars identical or fraternal twins? Identical
13. What are the axes of a Fourier Transform plot? Frequency and Amplitude
14. What is K2? A salvaged Kepler mission beginning in 2014
15. What is galactic archeology? The study of the evolution of the Milky Way by measuring the chemical properties of stars.

AoTATX #67

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

1. When was the Hubble Space Telescope launched? April 24, 1990
2. How big is the Hubble Space Telescope? 13.2 meters (43.5 ft) long -- about the length of a large school bus
3. During the first HST Servicing Mission, what event made Fritz happiest? Replacing the Solar Arrays
4. Fritz thinks the outermost known planet orbiting Proxima Cen is most like: Uranus
5. What US coin did Fritz mention? Quarter
6. How many exoplanets have been discovered to date? 4151
7. What are two techniques used to study exoplanet atmospheres? Transmission spectroscopy and phase curves
8. Why do we like to observe exoplanets from space? The Earth's atmosphere isn't in the way
9. What are the clouds made of on GJ 1214b? Potassium chloride or zinc sulfide
10. How much hotter is habanero than Mercury? 2800 Kelvin
11. The sky coverage of the Hubble Deep Field image is how big compared to the size of the full moon? 1/140
12. Which camera made possible the discovery of galaxies at times around 500 million years after the Big Bang? Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3)
13. When did the total amount of star-formation activity in the universe reach its peak? 10 billion years ago
14. Which of the following is NOT a reason to put a telescope in space? It is cheaper

AoTATX #66

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

1. The Serpens cloud is … a gas cloud making lots of young stars.
2. How long would it take light to move across each lobe of the Great Shadow in Serpens? Between 30 and 100 days
3. What type of object is being shadowed? A young star called HBC 672
4. Who first introduced the idea of capturing sound on Mars? Carl Sagan
5. When will the Mars Perseverance (Mars 2020) Rover land on the Red Planet? 2021
6.  What was the first spacecraft / nation to successfully land on the Moon? Luna 9 - USSR
7. What is the coating used on the JWST mirror segments? Gold
8. How big is the JWST primary mirror? 6.5 meters
9. Where is JWST going to live? Lagrange point 2
10. What wavelength range does JWST probe? Near-Infrared