Astro 201 Exercise 5

These are questions thought of as a group exercise in class. The answers to the "who" questions are either "Copernicus," "Johannes Kepler," "Tycho Brahe," or "Galileo Galilei."

1. Who published the heliocentric theory?
2. What is Kepler's first law?
3. What is Kepler's second law?
4. Galileo was the first to use what observational tool? A: the telescope.
5. How many moons did Galileo discover orbiting Jupiter? A: 4
6. Who used Tycho's work to prove his theory?
7. Who discovered mountains on (Earth's) moon?
8. Who took nightly measurements of the positions of all planets to an accuracy of about an arcminute?
9. Who was forced to recant his theories by the Roman Catholic Church?
10. Who developed the idea that the orbits of planets were ellipses rather than circles?
11. Who devised a geometric method for determining the relative distances of the planets from the sun? (Relative, that is, to the sun-earth distance.)
12. Who discovered that Venus shows phases like those of the moon?
13. What did Copernicus realize with a heliocentric model? A: It enabled him to determine which planets are closer to the sun, which are farther away, and the relative distances of all of them.
14. Instead of working with circles, Kepler worked with what? A: ellipses
15. Did Copernicus's heliocentric model utilize epicycles? A: yes.
16. Whose records did Kepler use to test his (Kepler's) predictions of planetary positions?
17. What was Copernicus's job? A: I think this must be a trick question! He was a lawyer, physician, economist, canon, and artist.
18. Who wrote "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium"?
19. Who wrote "De Stella Nova"?
20. Who wrote a book now known as "New Astronomy"?

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