Exam 2: Gravitation and the Motion of the Planets

Copernicus lived

Which of these four questions arising from modern ideas of force and matter is one of the great unanswered questions of contemporary science?

Consider a comet in a long, thin elliptical orbit with a semimajor axis of one astronomical unit. What can be said about the sidereal period of this comet?

What is the typical period of a hyperbolic orbit?

The time interval between two successive repeated positions of a planet with respect to the Sun and Earth in its orbit, such as conjunction to conjunction, is known as

When a planet is seen at opposition, it is always at its

Which of these statements MOST closely expresses the principle of "Occam's razor" as it applies to theoretical explanations of physical phenomena?

A feather and a boulder will have equal accelerations when falling under the influence of gravity in a vacuum because

An astronomer discovers an object at a distance of 28 Mpc from Earth. At this distance, what is the object MOST likely to be?

What did Galileo see when he observed Jupiter through his telescope?

The ancient Greek thinker Pythagoras held the view that

Two solid spheres of equal size and mass are joined by a spring-loaded, extendible rod. The whole unit is spinning like a baton (end-over-end) 5 times per second. Suddenly the rod stretches, pushing the spheres farther apart. What change takes place as a result of the stretching?

Suppose the distance from Earth to a newly discovered star has been measured as 131 pc. Expressed in light-years, the distance is approximately

Jupiter will be at which configuration when it is at the middle of its retrograde motion?

Which object was discovered after its position had been predicted by the application of Newtonian mechanics to the deviation in the motion of another planet?

The word "planet" is derived from a Greek term meaning

Jupiter and the Sun exert gravitational forces on each other. For this situation

A scientific theory is accepted as the best description of a certain phenomenon if it

If an observer were observing Earth's motion from another planet, would they observe occasional retrograde motion?

A certain star is found to be 340 ly from Earth. Expressed in parsecs, the distance is approximately