Astronomy 101 Jeopardy

The night sky, light, stellar life cycles, galaxies, and the Big Bang on a free Astronomy 101 board. Project it and let students buzz in from their phones.

6 categories · 30 clues · Final Jeopardy · everyone buzzes in from their phone

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The Night Sky

$200
This star lies almost directly above Earth's North Pole and barely seems to move through the night.
What is Polaris?
$400
The Sun's apparent yearly path through the zodiac constellations is called this.
What is the ecliptic?
$600
Astronomers map positions on this imaginary globe on which the stars appear to be fixed.
What is the celestial sphere?
$800
Earth's axial tilt of about 23.5 degrees is the reason for these.
What are the seasons?
$1,000
This celestial coordinate, measured eastward in hours, is the sky's version of longitude.
What is right ascension?

Light and Telescopes

$200
Telescopes that gather light with a curved mirror rather than a lens are called these.
What are reflecting telescopes?
$400
The full range of light from radio waves to gamma rays makes up this.
What is the electromagnetic spectrum?
$600
Light from a galaxy moving away from us is stretched to longer wavelengths, an effect called this.
What is redshift?
$800
A telescope's light-gathering power depends mainly on this, the diameter of its main lens or mirror.
What is the aperture?
$1,000
This law says that hotter objects emit most strongly at shorter wavelengths.
What is Wien's law?

Stellar Life Cycles

$200
Stars form when these cold, dense clouds of gas and dust collapse under gravity.
What are molecular clouds?
$400
In the Sun's core, hydrogen is turned into helium by this process.
What is nuclear fusion?
$600
This diagram plots stars' luminosity against their surface temperature.
What is the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram?
$800
Stars spend most of their lives on this band of the diagram, fusing hydrogen in their cores.
What is the main sequence?
$1,000
After its core hydrogen runs out, a Sun-like star swells into this large, cool, luminous star.
What is a red giant?

Stellar Remnants

$200
This object's gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from it.
What is a black hole?
$400
This rapidly spinning neutron star sweeps beams of radiation past Earth like a lighthouse.
What is a pulsar?
$600
This boundary around a black hole marks the point of no return.
What is the event horizon?
$800
This glowing shell of gas cast off by a dying Sun-like star was misnamed by early observers.
What is a planetary nebula?
$1,000
Chinese astronomers recorded a supernova in 1054 whose remains form this nebula in Taurus.
What is the Crab Nebula?

Galaxies

$200
Our Sun belongs to this barred spiral galaxy.
What is the Milky Way?
$400
This is the nearest large spiral galaxy to our own, visible to the naked eye from dark sites.
What is the Andromeda Galaxy?
$600
Edwin Hubble's diagram sorting galaxies into ellipticals and spirals is often compared to this two-pronged object.
What is a tuning fork?
$800
The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy goes by this name.
What is Sagittarius A*?
$1,000
Galaxy rotation curves that stay flat far from the center are key evidence for this unseen substance.
What is dark matter?

Cosmology

$200
This theory says the universe expanded from an extremely hot, dense state about 13.8 billion years ago.
What is the Big Bang?
$400
The relationship that galaxies recede at speeds proportional to their distance is known as this.
What is Hubble's law?
$600
Discovered in 1965, this faint microwave glow fills the sky as leftover radiation from the early universe.
What is the cosmic microwave background?
$800
This mysterious form of energy is thought to be driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.
What is dark energy?
$1,000
This proposed burst of extremely rapid expansion happened a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
What is cosmic inflation?

Final Jeopardy — Stellar Remnants

The Chandrasekhar limit, about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, is the maximum mass of this kind of stellar remnant.

What is a white dwarf?

How to run this board

This board goes beyond the solar system into the rest of an intro astronomy course: the motions of the night sky, light and telescopes, the life cycles of stars, stellar remnants, galaxies, and cosmology from the Big Bang to dark energy.

The Stellar Life Cycles and Remnants columns build on each other, so play them in order. A quick sketch of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram on the whiteboard gives teams something to point to when they answer.

In a large lecture section, let each row of seats act as a team with one phone. Keep the pace brisk and save discussion for the clues that stump everyone.

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