Quiz answers

I didn’t handle my quiz perfectly, as I realized on seeing the first comment: “What are the answers?”  I should have said: “Give your answers as comments, and when they all seem to be in I’ll tell you your score.”  But the traditional quiz procedure hardly makes sense, now that by searching the World Wide Web you can find an answer (often a correct one) to almost any question.  Better would be to say: “More fun for you if you search your head first before you search Wikipedia.”  We’ll try it again sometime, and here’s a bonus question to be going on with:

What do “starling,” the bird, and “starboard,” the right-hand side of a ship, have to do with stars?

(1) Draco is the constellation that winds around the north celestial pole.

(2) There are 88 official constellations, but 89 pieces would be needed to make a jigsaw puzzle, because Serpens is in two non-contiguous parts.

(3) Regulus is the bright star with the same name as a Roman general: Marcus Atilius Regulus, regarded as an exemplar of the mores of “the brave days of old.”  He waged a successful war against Rome’s great enemy Carthage (over in what is now Tunisia) until in 255 BC the Carthaginians defeated and captured him.  They sent him home on condition that he come back with a peace treaty.  But he urged the Romans to reject the treaty, and then, obedient to the vow he had made, returned to Carthage knowing that he would be tortured to death.  One thing supposedly done to him is so ghastly that the thought of it ruins sleep.  Fortunately, the torture and even the execution may be inventions of anti-Carthage propagandists or of sadistic fantasists, since they are not mentioned in the major history written two centuries later by Diodorus Siculus (who was of Sicily, as his name means, and was anti-Carthaginian), making it appear that Regulus just died, a few years after his capture.  The star was not named for the man or vice versa: the Latin word is a diminutive of rex, “king.”  Marcus was his praenomen, Atilius his nomen or family name, Regulus a cognomen, a kind of nickname of his branch of the family, perhaps because they had once been rulers of Campania, the region around Naples, from which they came.

(Where does “the brave days of old” come from?  Macaulay’s ballad “How Horatius Kept the Bridge.”  Horatius lived about three centuries before Regulus, and days were even braver back then, in the view of Roman conservatives.)

Someone found another Roman general, Marcus Valerius Corvus.  I didn’t know of him, but Corvus the Crow is a constellation, not a star.

(4) Stars with blue surfaces are the hottest, those with reddish surfaces relatively cool.  The colors, if we could see them up close, would be not only very bright but unsaturated, not differing greatly from white.

The coolest part of  a flame is red.  Illustration from To Know the Stars.

(5) In 2006 the definition of “planet” suggested by an International Astronomical Union committee was that it is massive enough to pull itself into near-spherical shape, is in orbit around a star, and is not a star nor a satellite of another planet.  This would have allowed inclusion of Pluto and other large transneptunians, ultimately perhaps thousands of them, and the large asteroid Ceres.  But at the final assembly one more criterion was added: a planet has to have cleared out the neighborhood of its orbit.  This excluded Pluto and other members of swarms.  Those that met the other criteria but not this became the new category of “dwarf planet.”  (I think it would be simpler to think of them as just “large minor planets.”  They are all far smaller than Mercury or the Moon.)

(6) A light-year is the distance light travels in an Earth-year, but the parsec (parallax-second), often used by scientists, is the distance at which a star would have a parallax of one second of arc (1/3600 of a degree).  The parallax is half of the angular distance the star appears to move when seen from opposite sides of Earth’s orbit; in other words, it is the star’s maximum displacement from where it would be if viewed from the Sun.  One parsec is 3.262633 light-years, or 206,265 astronomical units (Sun-Earth distances).  There is no star as near as a parsec; Proxima Centauri is about 1.3 parsecs or  4.2 light-years away.

(7) Voyager 2 visited (that is, flew by) Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Detail from an illustration in Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, showing the paths of the two Voyagers in red.

(8) “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” was modestly used by Isaac Newton in a letter to another  scientist, Robert Hooke, though the metaphor of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants to see farther goes back to earlier thinkers.

(I tend to use “farther” for physical and “further” for abstract distance, in writing at least; it may be a topic discussed in Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.)

(10) The countries in Reprieve’s quiz, to be selected from groups of three outline maps, were China, Egypt, Singapore, USA, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, Jordan.  The maps, being of similar size, were at different scales, but all were easy to recognize except, for me, Singapore, a small archipelago at the tip of Malaya, and it was easy to see that the map wasn’t Iceland or Japan.  You felt pleased with yourself at the end of the quiz, and then you got a shock about these countries.

(9) Kepler’s equation: I’ve moved this to last place because, as Cervantes so often says at the ends of the chapters of Don Quixote, it “deserves a chapter to itself.”