Other than planets name 3 things that orbit the sun
Dwarf planets, comets, dust
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How are stars and planets different?
Stars are huge, hot, far away and give out lots of light. Planets smaller, reflect sunlight, and much closer to us
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Approximately how old is the solar system?
5 thousand million years
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What is the source of the sun’s energy?
It comes from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei
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What are comets made of?
Rock, dust and ice
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Roughly how many stars make up the Milky Way Galaxy?
Thousands of millions of stars (10‾)
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What is a light year?
The distance the light travels through space in one year
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Roughly how many times larger is the diameter of the Milky way that the diameter of the sun?
The diameter of the Milky Way is about 600 billion times the diameter of the sun
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How old is the universe?
14,000 million years
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Briefly describe parallax and how it is used to measure the distance of nearby stars
Parallax is when something appears to move when you look at it from different places. Astronomers take pictures of the sky six months apart. The apparent movement of a star in between the two photos let you work out how far away it is.
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What is red shift?
This is when the wavelength of the light from a galaxy becomes redder when it moves away from us
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Explain the evidence that shows that the Universe is expanding
The greater the red shift, the faster the galaxy is moving away from us which makes it more distant to us
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Name the process that wears mountains down
Erosion
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Briefly explain Wegener’s theory of continental drift
Wegener theory was that 300 million years ago there had been just one supercontinent which he called Pangaea, which then broke into smaller continents and started drifting apart
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What evidence did Wegener find that backed up his hypothesis?
He found matching layers in the rocks of different continents and similar fossils in both South America and South Africa
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Why was Wegener’s theory rejected at first?
Because Wegener’s explanation of how the continent drifted wasn’t convincing and the movement was not detectable. And Wegener was a meteorologist not a geologist
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How fast are some sea floors spreading each year?
A few cm
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Briefly explain the changes you see in the magnetic orientation of sea floor rocks
As the liquid magma erupts out of the gap, iron particles in the rocks tend to align themselves with the earth’s magnetic field and as it cools they set in position.
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What causes tectonic plates to drift?
The convection currents in the mantle caused by heating in the core and mantle
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Where do most earthquakes and volcanoes occur?
At the edges of plates where plates meet
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How are the Himalayas being formed?
Where India is crashing into the Eurasian plate, as when plates crash into each other mountains are formed
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What do earthquakes produce?
They produce wave motions (shock waves) which travel on the surface and inside the Earth
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Name the two types of seismic waves cause by earthquakes state what type of wave it is
P-waves are longitudinal and S-waves are transverse
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What type of seismic waves can’t pass through liquids?
S-waves
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What is the formula that relates wave speed, frequency and wavelength?
Wave speed (m/s) = frequency (Hz) × wavelength (m)
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Other cards in this set
Card 2
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Other than planets name 3 things that orbit the sun
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