David Schmell

Chapter 2 review

1: Newton wrote down the equation for the law of gravitation. 2: The earth orbits the sun in an ellipse. 3: Uranus would take the longest time to orbit the sun. 4: A sun centered model of the solar system is called a heliocentric model. 5: The earth takes 365 days, 6 hours and 9 minutes to complete a sidereal orbit of the sun. 6: Copernicus explained the retrograde motion of the planets with epicycles. 7: The planets that can never be seen at opposition are Venus and Mercury because they are inferior planets. The planets that never pass through inferior conjunction are Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn, and Neptune. 8: It would be the best to observe Mercury or Venus at greatest elongation because it is partially lit by the sun and is not too far to see. It would be best to observe Mars, Jupiter, or Saturn at would be at superior conjunction because the sun would be shinning at it the most. 9: a synodic period of a planet is the time that it takes that planet to reappear at the same point in the sky. The sidereal period of a planet is the time it takes for that planet to orbit the sun 1 time. 10: Keplers three laws were the law of ellipses, the law of equal areas, and his third law was: the square of a planets sidereal period around the sun is directly proportional to the cube of the length of its orbits semimajor axis. These laws are important because they are what some todays astronomy is based on. 11: Galileos observations supported a heliocentric cosmology because he could successfully observe all of the phases of Venus. 12: Newtons approach to understanding planetary motion differed from that of all his predecessors because he understood that gravity was the force that keeps the planets in orbit. 13: The difference between mass and weight is that weight is the measurement of the effect of gravity on an object, while mass is the amount of matter that is inside an object.

14: The discovery of Neptun was a major confirmation of Newtons universal law of gravitation because astronomers predicted Neptun to exist by gravitational effects that were observed. They noticed this because Uranus was not following the orbit it was supposed to. 15: An astronaut has to exert force on a weightless object to move it because the object has mass and to move an object a force has to be exerted upon it. 16: The closest age of the universe when our solar system formed is: E, 10 billion years. 17: Pluto is most similar in composition to Eris. 18: The four ways for discovering extra solar planets are the astrometric method, the transit method, Microlensing, and radial velocity.