50/50 in Science VIII Trivia Quiz

Answer: True

Ambient and vapor pressures are contributing factors which affect the boiling points of substances. The others are the amount of impurities contained in a liquid, and the concentration of the primary substance in mixtures. Different substances have different vapor pressures at a given temperature; substances with greater vapor pressures would have lower boiling points. Heating the substance causes vapor pressure to go up. Boiling point is the temperature at which the vapor pressure of the substance equals the ambient pressure surrounding it.

Their melting points are also affected by differing ambient pressures, but by extremely tiny bits compared to their boiling points.

Answer: True

Mercury and Venus are the only solar system planets that don't have moons in orbit. This leaves Earth the closest planet to the Sun to host a moon.

Answer: False

The so-called empty space is in fact not empty at all, but contains many forms of entities, including photons, virtual particles, and dark energy. In addition, the space is part of the four-dimensional fabric of space-time.

Answer: False

Magnetic poles lie in different locations than geographic poles. What's more, the magnetic poles don't lie exactly opposite to each other. The North Magnetic Pole lies close to the North Geographic Pole, while the South Magnetic Pole lies much further away from the South Geographic Pole and is not even within the Antarctic Circle. Magnetic poles are moving nearly 60 km/yr (36 mi/yr), while geographic poles lie stationary.

Answer: False

Not all comets came from the Oort Cloud. Some comets originate from the Kuiper Belt, while some even originated from the vicinity of Jupiter's orbit.

Answer: True

You may have heard of electrons before, but you may not have heard of leptons. Leptons are the class of subatomic particles that include electrons, muons, taus, and their neutrinos. Leptons have a spin of 1/2 and interact with electromagnetic, gravitational, and weak nuclear forces.

Answer: True

Crux, also known as the Southern Cross, is the smallest of the 88 modern constellations. Crux has four bright stars that form the cross that is seen in flags of several countries in the Southern Hemisphere, including Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil.

Answer: False

Many people seem to believe that astrology and astronomy are the same concepts and it is surprising to some that astrology is not the same as astronomy. Astrology is not a true scientific field as it deals with the effects of night sky events on people and cultures, especially through religions and horoscopes. Astronomy is the scientific study of physical objects beyond Earth. Astrology used to partner with astronomy until astrology was designated as a pseudo-science.

Answer: True

The star's expected lifespan depends inversely on its mass. The lifespan of a star can be calculated by dividing 10 billion, which represents the life expectancy of our Sun, by the cube of the star's mass relative to our Sun. Based on this formula, it can be seen that low mass stars live longer, while massive stars live fast and die young.

The least massive stars (less than 0.1 solar masses) can live for more than a trillion years, while the most massive stars (more than 250 solar masses) can only live for several hundred years.

Answer: True

An event in which most terrestrial life dies is called a mass extinction, which has happened roughly five times over the last 500 million years. Some of the causes of mass extinctions include an asteroid/comet impact, which is believed to have caused the extermination of dinosaurs 66 million years ago, a catastrophic climate change, which caused the mass extinction 250 million years ago, and an exploding star, which may have triggered the extinction 450 million years ago.

Answer: False

Of all the colors on the rainbow, green stars and violet stars do not exist. Logically, green stars should be hotter than yellow stars and cooler than blue stars. Green stars don't exist because stars that emit light in the green region of the spectrum would also emit plenty of red and blue light, thus making the star white instead of green. On the other hand, violet stars likely don't exist either because there are no stars hot enough to produce violet light, or if they do exist our eyes are not sensitive to violet light.

Answer: True

Luna can be regarded as one of the proper names of our moon, in the same way the moons of other planets have been named. This is where we get the adjective 'lunar' from, to describe our moon.

Answer: False

It hasn't rained on Mars for million of years. Much of Mars is covered in deserts dryer than the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth. The reasons Mars doesn't get rain is that much of the world usually has temperatures way below freezing, so its thin atmosphere only allows water to exist as a liquid no higher than 10°C (50°F).

Answer: False

The first supermassive black holes in the early universe were produced from gases and dust that collapsed too quickly for stars to result. So in essence, supermassive black holes formed when stars died before they were born! Masses of supermassive black holes are millions to billions of times more massive than our Sun.

Supermassive black holes lie at the centers of all galaxies, including our Milky Way. Right now, we are orbiting the supermassive black hole at a distance of 26,000 light-years!

Answer: True

This question stumped you as you were thinking logically! It is true that hot water can freeze more quickly than cold water, defying logic as water freezes when it is cold enough, or in other words hot water is further from freezing than cold water. This paradoxical phenomenon is called the Mpemba effect. Scientists aren't sure why hot water can freeze faster than colder water. One common suggested cause is that hot water evaporates faster, releasing greater amounts of energy, depleting it from the system faster, therefore making hot water to turn to ice faster.

Another suggested cause is convection, in which heat rises towards the top, where it cools and sinks back down; when water is at the top of the container, energy is lost more quickly to ambient medium then they are in the bottom, resulting in quicker cooling towards freezing.

Other suggested causes include conduction, and the amount of solutes or dissolved gases contained within it.