Section 3 - Light and Telescopes

ASRTRONOMY 1345

What even is the purpose of light/photons?

To move energy from one region of space to another

The light that we see originating from the Sun is mostly:

Emitted

To the naked eye, the Sun's light appears:

White

Pink light is:

A photon of red light and photon of blue light entering your eye

The link between emitted light's energy and the temperature of the object creating that light is:

Substantial, as a small increase in temperature leads to a large jump in photon energy

A telescope is best described as:

A light bucket

The Sun's hot, visible surface creates photons of different energies from across the electromagnetic spectrum. The photon wavelength which Sun creates in greatest numbers would appear - if isolated from all the other colors of the Sun - as which of the following colors?

blue-green

The objective of a telescope is:

A large lens or mirror

Photons carry:

Electromagnetic energy

In astronomy, the constant c is reserved for:

The speed of light

1 light year is equivalent to 5.878×1012 miles. Light travels at 2.99792458×105 kilometers per second, with every kilometer = 0.62 miles. With 1 year equaling 365.25 days and every day containing 86,400 seconds, how long would it take a red visible light photon to travel a distance of 1 light year

1 year

Which photon travels fastest: the long wavelength radio, the short wavelength x-ray, the high energy gamma ray, or the low energy microwave?

All photons travel at the same speed

An Angstrom is:

A unit used to measure the wavelength and thus the energy of photons

Which of the following telescopes is best suited to observed the Universe's radio emitting objects?

Telescope #1

The energy of photons emitted by an object (which contribute to an object's overall color and decide whether it is a strong x-ray emitter, or UV radiator) are dependent on the object's:

Temperature

Which sophisticated medical device makes use of the radio radiation emitted when the molecules and electrons inside of your body are jostled by a magnetic field?

MRIs

The newly launched James Webb telescope is sometimes referred to as "Hubble's replacement." Given the wavelength range at which the James Webb operates, which telescope will Webb be "replacing" or surpassing when it becomes operational?

Spitzer

Which object can be expected to produce the most energetic photons?

Gamma ray bursts

Which of the following is NASA's most compelling reason for launching large telescopes into space?

The Earth's atmosphere blocks many forms of electromagnetic radiation from reaching the surface

Which of the following will likely create radio photons?

Electrons caught in a magnetic field

What kind of light do you expect to be generated very near a black hole?

X-ray and gamma ray

What kind of light do you expect Saturn to emit? (Saturn's cloud top surface temperature is about 200° below zero Fahrenheit, or 140 Kelvin)

Mid IR

The "Bullet Cluster" is a huge conglomeration of hundreds of large galaxies all colliding and interacting with one another. As their gravity bends and warps and reshapes the galactic disks in violent collisions, sheets of superheated, million degree gas are thrown out into space. What Great Observatory would be best suited to viewing photons from this superheated gas around the galaxy cluster?

Chandra

The Hubble Telescope is:

The visible light Great Observatory

Which space-based telescope was created specifically to observe radio photons?

There is no radio space telescope

The next-generation replacement for the Hubble telescope will be:

The James Webb telescope

Which of the following was the probable location of the Compton Telescope - one of the Great Observatory telescopes - during its operational lifetime?

In low Earth orbit as a height of 350 miles above the planet's surface

Which of the following types of electromagnetic radiation are placed in order from highest energy to lowest energy?

X ray, Blue Visible, Red Visible, Near Infrared, Radio

Which of the following types of electromagnetic radiation are placed in order from shortest wavelength to longest wavelength?

X ray, Blue Visible, Red Visible, Near Infrared, Radio

"5G radiation" is a form of:

Radio light, which is generally harmless and non-ionizing

A CCD would be used:

To convert incoming photons into measurable electric signals

While walking around campus, a jittery student walks up and exclaims that you are a being of light, and that your body is emitting light. While you notice that he is holding a suspicious, mostly empty bag of mushrooms and that his eyes are dilated to the size of tennis balls, you wonder to yourself, is he scientifically correct?

Yes, the human body does emit mid-infrared radiation

Firefighters, battling an intense forest fire, find that their ability to target hot spots in the 1200K fire is being badly hampered by thick clouds of soot and ash limiting daytime visibility. What type of camera would help the firefighters see through the obscuring ash?

A near infrared sensitive camera

What is the lowest possible temperature?

0 Kelvin

The star Betelgeuse is highly evolved and - like many old stars - bloated and cool at 3000K. Its outer layers are turbulent and misty and stretch over a billion miles across, glowing red in the visible wavelengths. Astronomers wondered if Betelgeuse's outer layers stretched even further into space and were just invisible to ground-based telescopes because those outer layers were even cooler than 3000K and weren't generating visible light. Which Great Observatory could be used to gather light from Betelgeuse's even cooler, larger upper layers?

Spitzer

Lightning strikes are very quick but very bright, caused by electric charges suddenly rushing from one part of the atmosphere to another. Gas that happens to be in the path of this sudden electron stampede will find themselves turned into "plasma," a soup of atoms and electrons that have been knocked out of place. As these electrons rejoin their atoms and fall back into place they will emit an x-ray "afterglow." What Great Observatory would be best suited to seeing the aftereffects of lightning strikes on distant planets like Jupiter and Mars?

Chandra

It's thought (and it's true) that heavy elements (like the calcium in your bones, the phosphorus in your DNA, or the iron in your hemoglobin) are created in the explosive destruction of massive stars. These explosions also create radioactive elements, like uranium, plutonium, americium, radon, and thorium, to name a few. Astronomers can't see individual atoms in the gas flying away from an exploded star but they do know that when radioactive elements like uranium, plutonium, radon, etc. undergo radioactive decay, their dissolving nucleus gives off a certain type of electromagnetic radiation. Which Great Observatory could see the powerful yet rare photons generated from nuclear decay?

Compton

As opposed to a 6563 Å photon, a 4244 Å photon is:

higher energy

Why would your eye make for an undesirable astronomical observation device? (I.e., why is your eye a garbage telescope)

All of the above seem pretty awful for a telescope

In 1983, the largest Earth-based telescope was the BTA-6 in Russia and Hale Telescope in California, with diameters of 236 inches and 200 inches, respectively. That same year, NASA launched the IRAS telescope, an infrared telescope with a diameter of 22 inches, or roughly 1% the light gathering area of BTA-6 or the Hale. Why would NASA spend the resources and money on IRAS or its other HEAO-program telescopes rather than saving money on a launch and building large versions of those telescopes on Earth?

A telescope like IRAS, no matter what its diameter, could not be functionally built on Earth

In comic books, Superman purportedly has x-ray vision, which I assume means that he can see x-rays, not that his eyes emit x-rays. Your vision is visible-light, meaning you can sense the presence of visible photons, not that your eyes create visible-light. If you had x-ray vision instead of your normal visible-light vision and were looking around the classroom, what would you see?

You would see a whole lot of nothing. Just disorienting blackness with no sense of direction

The Crab Nebula - through a large Earth-based telescope - looks like a spongy, knotty tangle of colorful gas. This expanding cloud is the remains of the outer layers of a star that detonated and blew itself apart several thousand years ago. What does this same nebula look like through the Chandra space telescope?

A bright pinpoint of light coming from the ultra-dense collapsed core of the star, a swirling disk of hot gas orbiting the core, and high-speed, high temperature jets erupting through the poles of the disk

5800K should be read as:

"5800 kelvin," and describes the temperature of an object