1. Which of the following tries to estimate the number of communicating civilizations in the Galaxy?

a. The Oppenheimer Comparison.
b. The Planck Function.
c. The Fermi Paradox.
d. The Drake Equation.
e. None of the above.

2. Which of the following is NOT a method for detecting extra-solar planets around a star?

a. Monitoring its brightness of planetary transits.
b. Looking for a wobble in its proper motion across the sky.
c. Observing period variations in its spectroscopic Doppler shift.
d. Direct imaging.
e. All of the above have been tried.

3. What is a brown dwarf?

a. An object with a mass greater than about 13 Jupiter masses.
b. An object with a mass less than about 70 Jupiter masses.
c. An object massive enough to develop some fusion reactions, but not massive enough to fuse H to He.
d. An object massive enough to have a completely convective core, but not massive enough to fuse H to He.
e. All of the above, together, define a brown dwarf.

4. It is unlikely that an intelligent species would evolve around a star with 20 times the mass of the Sun, because ...

a. the inhabitable zone would be too small to have a planet inside it.
b. most such stars are binaries.
c. massive stars don't last long enough for intelligence to evolve.
d. massive stars don't have enough of the elements necessary for life.
e. All of the above are valid reasons.

5. By taking a spectrum of a star or planet, we can study its ...

a. radial velocity.
b. composition.
c. temperature.
d. All of the above.
e. None of the above.

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Last modified 17 December, 2006. © Gregory C. Sloan.