A molecular biologist from Madurai, our quizmaster enjoys trivia and music, and is working on a rock ballad called ‘Coffee is a Drink, Kaapi is an Emotion’. @bertyashley
Quiz | Easy like Sunday morning: Starry starry night!
Although we depict sunlight as yellow, and it is classified as a ‘yellow-dwarf’ star, what colour is the sun?
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1 / 10 |
Born on this date in 1910, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an astrophysicist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the evolution of stars. One of the most important values named after him is the Chandrasekhar Limit. What happens to stars above the limit when they collapse?
Answer : They become a blackhole or a neutron star.
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2 / 10 |
One of the most regularly used numbers to denote this particular observation is ‘a million’. That is not true, with the number being more around 2,000 and going up to 2,500 on a clear night. What does this number denote?
Answer : Number of stars visible to the naked eye.
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3 / 10 |
Proxima Centauri is a low-mass star that is 4.25 light-years away. It is too small to be seen with the naked eye. What is the star’s significance, which is referred to in its name?
Answer : Closest to Earth after the sun (‘Proxima’ means nearest)
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4 / 10 |
The temperature of the star also has its corresponding colour, with which a star burns bright. The stellar colour classification defies normal on-Earth convention as stars get hotter. What colour are the hottest stars?
Answer : Blue. ‘Red Hot’ stars are the coldest.
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5 / 10 |
Our sun is a nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma that emits light in all colours of the visible spectrum. So, although we depict sunlight as yellow, and it is classified as a ‘yellow dwarf’ star, what colour is the sun?
6 / 10 |
The original word for these entities was ‘astron’ in Ancient Greek. They recognised 12 of these, and across many cultures, the same have been referenced, with them having special significance attached to each. Currently, the International Astronomical Union has identified 88 of these. What are these?
7 / 10 |
‘Lucy’ is a white dwarf star located 50 light years away and has a diametre of 4,000 km. It has become crystallised after a pulsar stripped away most of its mass, leaving behind a carbon core under immense pressure over billions of years. What do scientists believe it is now made of, which led to its name?
Answer : A Diamond Star (Lucy in the sky with Diamonds)
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8 / 10 |
One ritual in Indian weddings is for the newlyweds to spot the stars Arundhati (Alcor) and Vasishtha (Mizar) in the Big Dipper constellation. This garners a lot of symbolic significance because of the relation between the two stars. What kind of star system do they form?
Answer : Binary star system, where they orbit each other.
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9 / 10 |
On a clear night, you can see as far as 19 quadrillion miles up into the sky, with the star Deneb in Cygnus being the farthest. As the light of a star travels these vast distances into our vision, turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere causes disturbances in the light’s path. What does this lead to, which should remind you of a rhyme?
10 / 10 |
There are 59 countries whose national flags depict a star, with the United States having the maximum at 50. Of them, what is unique about the flags of Brazil, Australia and New Zealand?
Answer : They depict actual stars in the sky (constellations) and not just symbolic.
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