Exam 12: Dwarf Planets and Small Solar System Bodies

You find a blackened rock lying on top of the snow.You find that it is fairly dense and suspect it might be a meteorite.You take it to a lab,and they find that its age is 1.3 Gyr.Is this a meteorite? Why,or why not?

Astronomers can use the speed and direction of a cometary meteor's flight to actually identify its parent comet.

All short period comets have period < 20 years.

Most asteroids are found in orbit around the Sun between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn.

Like meteoroids and asteroids,cometary nuclei in the Oort Cloud undergo frequent collisions that often send them into the inner Solar System.

The average density of a comet is approximately one-quarter times the density of water.

Consider three comets that have orbital periods of 10,100,and 1,000 years.Where would each of these comets likely originate,in the Oort Cloud or the Kuiper Belt? If you wanted to study material that was the best example of pristine Solar System material,which would you study?

Which of the following types of Solar System debris was NOT discovered until the age of telescopes?

The Perseid meteor shower will occur

Some asteroids have moons just as planets do.

Why does the dust tail separate from the ion tail?

The darkest asteroids are

Which group of asteroids regularly crosses Earth's orbit and thus represents a known collision threat to our planet?

Comet Halley is unique because

All meteorites are remnants of planetesimals that never coalesced to form a planet.

The mass of all the known asteroids combined would be as much as

Remnants of volcanic activity on the asteroid Vesta indicate that members of the asteroid belt

A comet having an orbit of 50 years would likely have come from the

All of the zodiacal dust in the Solar System combined is roughly equal in mass to

Why do long-period comets usually put on a much more visually spectacular display than short-period comets?