Exoplanets Vocabulary

Alien planets are faint, far away, and sitting right on top of their parent star, so it's difficult to get ___

• indirect evidence
• direct evidence
• anecdotal evidence
• circumstantial evidence

A planet outside of our solar system that orbits a star is officially called ___

• an alien planet
• an exoplanet
• a martian planet
• a distant planet

As the host star of the exoplanet makes its little circle, its light will undergo a ___

• polarization shift
• reflexive shift
• Mach shift
• Doppler shift

A more massive planet pulls harder on the star, making it move ___

• more quickly
• more slowly
• erratically
• imperceptibly

When a planet passes directly in front of its star, the event is called ___

• a transit
• en passant
• a transition
• a permutation

The beauty of transiting exoplanets is that the amount of starlight blocked tells you ___

• how far away the planet is
• how big the planet is
• the density of the planet
• the mass of the planet

If we know the planet's mass from the star's Doppler shift, we can use the planet's size to calculate ___

• its distance
• its density
• its luminosity
• its apparent brightness

A gas giant like Jupiter has a relatively ___

• low mass
• high mass
• low density
• high density

Designed to detect exoplanet transits, NASA launched a space-based telescope, in 2009, named ___

• Kepler
• the Hubble Space Telescope
• Planck
• the James Webb Space Telescope

Like Tatooine in the Star Wars saga, we've even found planets orbiting ___

• massive blue stars
• cool red dwarfs
• red giants
• binary stars