Homework 05

Please answer at least 4 of the following 5 questions correctly for full credit:

Question 1

Between Mars and Jupiter we have the Asteroid Belt, and beyond Neptune we have the Kuiper Belt. Are the objects in each belt made from the same materials? If your answer is no, please explain why there should be a difference.

Question 2

Gravity wants to pull everything together as closely as it can. What prevents all the dust in the proto-planetary cloud from just falling into the central star but instead shapes it to be spread out in a disk?

Question 3

Two collection of pictures are shown on the right hand side of slide 12 of my lecture 15 (see PDF). Explain why the proto-planetary disk in the lower collection is bright while it is a dark band in the upper collection.

Question 4

Same two collections of pictures as in Question 3: Which pictures were taken earlier in the evolution of a proto-planetary disk: the ones in the upper or the ones in the lower collection?

Question 5

How does our method of finding planets through the motion of their host star affect the size of the planets that we discover?
Please submit your answer as plain test in the main message body of an e-mail to kai-1060-hw@physics.utah.edu before midnight (MST) on Feb. 21, 2008. Plain text in the main message body of your e-mail means no attachments!!!
Last modified: Fri Feb 22 14:02:12 MST 2008