World Scholar's Cup Physics — practice questions
22 free MCQs with worked solutions. Tap any question for the answer + explanation, or practice them all in the app.
Practice World Scholar's Cup Physics in the app →Kepler inherits decades of hand-recorded planetary positions and builds his laws on them. Those records were mKepler cracks the puzzle of changing orbital speed using one planet whose orbit strays furthest from a circle.A student draws a planet's yearly path as a neat circle and is told the shape is wrong. The correct shape is:In that corrected drawing, where should the student place the Sun?An astronomer states an orbit's size as the distance from the centre of the ellipse to one end. She is quotingTwo orbits share the same major axis, but one has its foci much further apart. That difference is measured by A comet sweeps a broad wedge near the Sun and a long thin one far away, each in a month. This equal sweeping iA comet's speed is tracked all the way around its orbit. It moves fastest when it is:A planet on a perfectly circular orbit is timed at many points along the path. Its speed would be:Kepler discovered his third law in the year:Earth takes one year to travel once around the Sun. That stretch of time is called its:An astronomer wants solar system distances in handy units and takes the Earth to Sun distance as one. That uniA newly found body orbits with a semimajor axis of 50 astronomical units. Its orbital period is about:That newly found body, 50 astronomical units out, would sit beyond the orbit of:A rocky chunk orbits with a semimajor axis of 3 astronomical units. Its orbital period is about:A rocky body on a 3 astronomical unit orbit would be found between:An astronomer wants to apply the period and distance law to Earth itself. That law applies to:Two spacecraft drift twice as far apart. The gravitational pull between them depends on their masses and theirIn the gravitation formula, the fixed number written as G is known as the:A rocket must be fast enough never to fall back to Earth. That speed is called the:Knowing an orbit's shape and the equal area rule, an astronomer can work out a planet's:An astronomer can only measure how long a distant body takes to circle the Sun. She finds its distance using t