ASTR 110 M02,M03,M04 - FALL 13 - Holtzman
Review list for final
Study the class notes at
http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/holtz/a110/a110notes. Review the assignments.
Make sure you understand the big questions, things we talked about that are related to everyday experience:
- How and why do the stars and Sun move in the sky?
- Why do we have seasons?
- Why does the Moon have phases? What are eclipses?
- What is Earth's place in the Universe?
- How do orbits work?
- Why is the sky blue?
- What are nuclear reactions and how do they work in the Sun?
- What is the greenhouse effect?
The final will emphasize issues from the last part of the class (since
the second midterm), but will definitely include the important
issues from earlier parts of the class as well!
- Understand how the process of science works, including the fundamental
concept of how scientific models and theories are based on data,
predictions and verification. Understand some hallmarks of good
science, and why pseudoscience is fundamentally different from science.
Understand the difference between astronomy and astrology.
- Understand motions of objects in the sky as seen from Earth, which result
from a combination of our motion (reflex) and the intrinsic motion of
the object. Understand revolution and rotation of planets. Understand
apparent motion of stars, Sun with respect to the stars, and planets
with respect to the stars. In particular, understand day and night
and the path of the Sun and stars through the sky at different times
of year.
- Understand how the rotation axis of the Earth is tilted with respect to
its plane of revolution. Understand and be able to clearly
formulate the reason we have seasons.
- Understand the orbit of the Moon. Understand the reason that the Moon
has phases, and how the phases are related to the time of day/night when the
Moon is seen from Earth. Understand what solar and lunar eclipses are
and why they don't occur every month.
- Understand the motions and appearances of the planets. Be able to figure out
whether planets have phases when you look at them. Know what retrograde
motion is.
- Understand historically how humans have reached the present understanding
of motions in our Solar System, e.g., the geocentric and heliocentric
models and what observations motivated these models. Understand the
contributions of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler.
- Understand Kepler's laws and be able to use them. Know the terminology which
comes into Kepler's laws: ellipses, focii of ellipses, semimajor axis,
eccentricity, period, astronomical unit.
- Know the objects in the Solar system: Sun, planets, moons, asteroids,
meteors, comets, Kuiper belt, planets and dwarf planets.
Understand the concept of density and how we can use
it to get some information about the composition of planets.
- Know how the Sun is one of many stars that make up the Milky
Way galaxy; know about the variety of stars in the Galaxy. Know what shape the
Galaxy is, how we know this, and what the Milky Way contains (stars
and interstellar matter). Know the main different types of galaxies.
- Understand the motions of objects in the Universe: planets around the
Sun, stars moving inside of galaxies. Understand the observation that
galaxies all appear to be moving away from each other and the implication
that the Universe is expanding. Understand the basic ideas and
justifications for the Big Bang theory, and how it is a good example of
how the process of science works, including prediction and observation
of the microwave background, etc.
- Understand rough relative sizes of objects: Sun, planets, stars, Milky Way,
galaxies, and relative distances between them. Understand
what a scale model is and how they work, and how to apply one.
- Understand how astronomers can measure distances to objects that are
so far away using measurment of angles and also by studying brightnesses
of objects. Know what parallax and the inverse square law of brightness are.
Know some of the units that astronomers use to measure distances:
the astronomical unit and units of light travel time (like the light year).
- Understand Newton's laws of motion: law of inertia, force law, and action/reaction.
Understand the law of gravity and what the force of gravity depends on.
Understand what the different basic forces are.
Understand how the law of gravity can be used to calculate the relative
strength of gravity
at different places, for example, your weight on different planets.
- Understand how Newton's laws can be used to understand orbits, and that
Kepler's laws are a natural consequence of Newton's more basic laws
about how things move.
- Understand orbits: why objects can go around each other when the force
of gravity is an attractive force between the two objects.
Understand how our model for the formation of the Solar System leads to the
expectation that planets will have initial transverse velocities and thus
will orbit the Sun rather than fall into it.
- Understand how masses of astronomical objects are inferred using our
understanding of gravity and measurements of motions of objects. In
particular, understand how we measure masses of planets and stars.
Know ROUGHLY how massive these objects are: e.g., how massive are
different planets compared to the Earth, and how massive are different
stars compared to the Sun.
- Understand how we measure masses of galaxies,
and know why we believe that there is a large amount of dark matter
in the Universe.
- Understand the concept of gravitational lensing and qualitatively
how it can be used to infer masses of objects. Know what a black hole is.
- Light. Know about the general properties of light, and the different
forms that light can take (the electromagnetic spectrum), and how different
kinds of light are characterized by different wavelengths or different
energies. Know about the different kinds of spectra (continuous,
emission line, absorption line) that objects can produce. Understand
the types of spectra that different astronomical objects produce (e.g.,
stars produce absorption line spectra, etc.)
- Understand thermal (blackbody) radiation (continuous radiation from warm dense
sources) and how it can be used to infer temperatures of objects.
- Understand the effect of dust in the interstellar matter (and in the Earth's
atmosphere) on the colors of starlight. Know why the sky is blue and
why the sun can appear to change color between midday and sunset.
- Understand basic atomic structure and how the different elements differ
at the atomic level. Understand that atoms move and that the speed of
their motion is related to the temperature.
- Understand how emission and absorption lines are produced, and how they
are related to orbits of electrons in atoms.
Understand how we can observationally determine physical properties by
studying emission and absorption lines. In particular, know how we
can estimate temperatures and compositions of stars.
- Know that normal matter
in the Universe is primarily composed of hydrogen, with some helium,
and very little of everything else.
- Understand how the total brightness of stars depends on the temperature,
size, and distance of the star. Understand how we can use our previous
estimates of temperatures (from colors and/or spectra) and distances (from
parallax) to determine sizes of stars. Understand what a HR (color-magnitude)
diagram is, and where stars fall in this diagram. Understand the terminology:
main sequence, red giant, white dwarf.
- Know what the Doppler shift is, and how we can infer information about
the radial velocities of astronomical objects.
- Understand what nuclear reactions are, why they can produce energy,
why they require high temperatures, and what nuclear reaction is going on in the
Sun.
- Understand basic stages in evolution of stars, including the Sun.
Understand the production of heavier elements inside stars and their
distribution into space.
- Understand why we are interested in locations where one might
be able to find liquid water, and where in the Solar System liquid water
might exist, and why.
- Understand qualitatively what affects how hot it will be on planets. Understand
external heating by the Sun. In particular, understand the greenhouse
effect. Understand internal heating, both from heat left over from planet
formation and from tidal heating.
- Understand some of the factors that go into determining the
liklikhood that intelligent life might exist in the Universe. Understand
some of the recent observations of extrasolar planets.
Jon Holtzman
2013-12-02