
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- Pre-Lab Quiz: Planet Puzzlers
Pre-Lab Quiz: Planet Puzzlers
Discuss each question with your team. Be prepared to explain the reasoning behind your team's answers after the quiz.
- How recently did astronomers begin to discover planets around stars outside our solar system?
- Within the last thirty years
- The mid 1900s
- The mid 1800s
- The mid 1700s
- Which of the following is not a method used by astronomers to find exoplanets?
- Directly imaging the planets using telescopes
- Measuring the Doppler shift of the star to detect small 'wobbles' caused by orbiting planets
- Measuring changes in the intensity of the starlight caused by transiting planets
- Using radio waves to 'ping' extrasolar planets like a ship's sonar
- Roughly how many exoplanets have astronomers discovered so far?
- 50
- 500
- 5000
- 50,000
- Which of these strange types of objects have astronomers discovered outside of our solar system?
- Large gas giants with orbits very close to their star called 'hot Jupiters'
- Planets in orbit around stellar remnants like neutron stars and pulsars
- Massive terrestrial planets called 'super Earths'
- Free-floating planets that drift through interstellar space
- All of the above