4-17-13

Vinnie Caringella

Astronomy

4-17-13

Quiz

1. A white dwarf is the hot, compact corpses of low-mass stars

2. A close binary system can gradually gain mass if its companion is a main-sequence or giant star.

3. A neutron star is a ball of neutrons just a few kilometers in radius but with a mass like that of the Sun.

4. Neutron stars can spin rapidly and emit beams of radiation along their magnetic poles, which we detect as pulses of radiation if the beams sweep by Earth.

5. Swirling accretion disk around the neutron star, but much hotter and denser than an accretion disk around a white dwarf. X-ray binaries.

6. Jocelyn Bell discovered a rapidly rotating neutron star.

7 NO!!

8. She discovered a bit of "scruff" on her chart-recorder papers that tracked across the sky with the stars. The signal was pulsing with great regularity and temporarily dubbed it the Little Green Men

9.  Antony Hewish.

10. YES