Exam #2 is in class today.
Describe and compare the Eastern versus Western religious views of Creation. How does Hubble's law confirm the Judeo-Christian version?
Describe the Doppler effect and Hubble's law? How is redshift explained under an expanding Universe concept?
Describe the characteristics of spirals versus ellipticals. What is the reason for their morphological differences?
Describe two baryonic candidates for dark matter and why they are poor candidates.
Explain how an expanding Universe leads to Hubble's law.
How do we know that a majority of the mass in the Universe is in the form of dark matter? How do we know it is not in the form of stellar remnants or less than stellar mass objects (like brown dwarfs or rocks)?
How does quantum tunneling demonstrate the fuzzy nature to quantum entities?
How was dark matter discovered? What is the key argument that dark matter must be non-baryonic?
List and describe, briefly, the steps to determining the distance to galaxies.
What are baryons? How do the quarks in baryons bind together (despite their repulsive electric charge)? Why are there no free quarks (i.e. what is quark confinement)?
What are galaxies? Why are they important to modern cosmology? What is Hubble's law?
What are the three geometries of the Universe? What are the three possible futures of the Universe? How are they related? How does matter play a role in determining which of the three is true? (Assume no dark energy)
What are the three possible geometries for the Universe? If $\Omega_{\Lambda}$ is zero and $\Omega_M$ $>$ 1, what is the resulting geometry?
What are the two components to $\Omega_M$ and what are their values? If theory requires a total $\Omega$ of 1, why do these values require a cosmological constant?
What do $\Omega_k$,$\Omega_{\Lambda}$ and $\Omega_M$ mean (i.e. what do they measure)? What are the current values, how do we know them and what does this mean in terms of the future of the Universe?
What is Doppler redshift? What is expansion redshift? What is the meaning of Hubble's constant in terms of the `radius' of the Universe?
What is Hubble's law? Since it would seem impossible that all galaxies are rushing away from us, how does the expanding Universe explain redshift?
What is dark energy? How was it discovered? How did it change our view on the geometry and future history of the Universe? What is the current view (the Benchmark Model)?
What is lookback time? How does this effect the study of galaxies? Describe some effects of galaxy evolution.
