Bruce Betts' Online College Intro Astronomy Course 2014 Certificate Quiz
 

To get a Certificate of Achievement for watching the 2014 Bruce Betts Introduction to Planetary Science and Astronomy class (Physics 195 at California State University Dominguez Hills), a Random Space Fact (RSF) is given in each class designed to be “the” RSF that users will have to recognize later to get the certificate. The following is a multiple choice quiz. Enter your information then select the "certificate Random Space Fact" from each lecture. You must get at least 12 out of 13 correct to pass the quiz and receive a certificate to download.  Note: even the “incorrect” choices below are valid scientific facts, but are not those identified as the certificate facts in the classes.
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Lecture 1: Tour of the Solar System
1000 Earths could fit inside Jupiter and about 1000 Jupiters could fit inside the Sun.
12 people have walked on the surface of the Moon.
The surface pressure on Venus is approximately equal to the surface pressure 1 km (about 3000 feet) under the surface of the Earth's ocean.
The sun is about 440000 times brighter than the full moon and the full moon is more than 30000 times brighter than the brightest star.
 
Lecture 2: How We Explore Space
Before and after imaging that brackets appearance dates of fresh craters on Mars has indicated that impacts producing craters bigger than about 4 meters (3.9 meters (12.8 feet)) in diameter occur at a rate exceeding 200 per year globally.
The wavelength of light equals the speed of light divided by the frequency of that light.
Radar has been used to penetrate the atmospheres of cloud covered planetary bodies including Venus and Titan.
The International Space Station is visible in the night sky if you look at the right time, looking like a very bright star moving across the sky.
 
Lecture 3: Telescopes, The Moon
The highlands of the Moon are generally older than the mare.
The surface area of the Moon is approximately equal to the surface area of Africa.
The Moon is gradually getting farther away from the Earth.
The Hubble Space Telescope primary mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter.
 
Lecture 4: Mercury, Triad Planets, Venus
Mercury is in a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance.
We have images from four locations on the surface of Venus. (USSR's Venera 9, 10, 13, 14)
Venus has the slowest rotation rate of any planet in the solar system. Venus also rotates retrograde, which means the Sun rises in the west.
The surface gravities on Mercury and Mars are nearly equal, both about 38% of the surface gravity on Earth.
 
Lecture 5: Venus (cont.) and Mars
Mars' moon Phobos orbits Mars in < 8 hours, so completes 3 orbits in one Mars day, and rises in the west and sets in the east.
Mars' seasonal polar caps are made primarily of carbon dioxide ice (dry ice).
Olympus Mons on Mars is the largest volcano in the solar system.
The Mars atmosphere is made primarily of carbon dioxide.
 
Lecture 6: Mars (cont.) and Asteroids (general)
There are resonance gaps in the asteroid belt called Kirkwood gaps.
The mass of all the asteroids in the asteroid belt is less than 5% the mass of the Moon.
All Mars rovers have had six wheels.
The largest asteroid by far is 1 Ceres. It is 933 km in diameter and contains about 25% of the mass of all the other asteroids combined.
 
Lecture 7: Asteroid Threat and the Jupiter System
Most scientists believe the extinction of the dinosaurs and 70% of the species on Earth was triggered by an asteroid impact.
The mass of Jupiter is about 2.5 times the mass of all other Solar System planets and moons combined.
Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a giant storm that has persisted for at least hundreds of years.
Jupiter has both lightning and aurorae.
 
Lecture 8: Jupiter's Moons and the Saturn System
Saturn is the most oblate (flattened) planet in our solar system. Its spin causes it to be 10% "fatter" measured at the equator compared to measured at the poles.
Jupiter's four largest moons are named the Galilean Satellites after their discoverer: Galileo.
We have observed hexagonal cloud features at the poles of Saturn.
The atmospheric pressure at the surface of Titan is approximately one and a half times the surface atmospheric pressure on Earth.
 
Lecture 9: Titan (cont.), Uranus System, Neptune System
The moons of Uranus are named after characters from the plays of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.
Triton is the only large Moon in the solar system to orbit retrograde, the opposite direction of Neptune's rotation.
The blue color of the Uranian and Neptunian atmospheres is primarily caused by methane.
All 4 giant planets in our Solar System have ring systems.
 
Lecture 10: Transneptunian Objects including Pluto, Eris, Comets, Oort Cloud plus the Heliosphere
Transneptunian objects are very large, a few are larger than Ceres, the biggest asteroid, and many are larger than Pallas and Vesta the second and third largest asteroids.
Tidal effects that Pluto and Charon exert on each other have locked the two bodies into mutual spin-orbit resonance, meaning that one face of Charon always looks at Pluto while one face of Pluto always looks at Charon.
Comet tails always point approximately away from the Sun, even when the comet is moving outward in the Solar System (so the tails are leading the motion in that case).
Five spacecraft on trajectories to leave the solar system: Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, and New Horizons.
 
Lecture 11: Exoplanets and Solar System Formation
The probability of a random planetary orbit being along the line of sight to a star (e.g., for a Kepler detection) for an Earth size planet 1 AU (Earth-Sun distance) from a Sun like star is 0.47% or about 1 in 210.
Most exoplanets have been discovered either using the radial velocity method or the transit method.
More exoplanets were confirmed in 2014 than in all preceding years combined.
The radial velocity technique uses Doppler shifts to observe the wobble of a star caused by one or more planets.
 
Lecture 12: The Sun and Stars
The gravity at the surface of a neutron star is more than 100 billion times the gravity at the surface of the Earth.
The density at the center of the Sun is 151 grams per cubic centimeter, which is 151 times the density of water.
The star Betelgeuse in Orion is bigger than the size of Mars' orbit, and possibly as large as Jupiter's.
The Earth Moon system (384,000) would easily fit within the diameter of the Sun (1.4 million km).
 
Lecture 13: Galaxies, the Universe, Life
If we could shrink our solar system into the size of a U.S. quarter, the Milky Way galaxy would be the size of North America.
The universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old.
Less than 5% of the universe is made up of ordinary matter, with the rest being dark energy and dark matter.
All life on Earth requires liquid water.