Practice questions for Midterm 3

Clearly, the practice questions for the comprehensive part of the
final exam can be thought of as the sum of the practice questions
for exam 1 plus exam 2 plus exam 3!

1) Why do we care about the concept of pulsar kicks? What does it
mean? Why is it plausible? what mystery MIGHT it solve?

2) As in problem 1, why is the Supernova Remnant/ Neutron Star connection
so weak? Jumping head in the notes, what about black holes as central
sources of supernovae?

3) Why is it cool that planets were discovered orbiting a pulsar?
What's different about these planets from the ones found by the Doppler Effect
work ("radial velocity searches")?

4) What's important about "the binary pulsar"?

5) What are millesond pulsars? If they're spinning really fast, does that
imply they're young, newly born?

6) What are xray binaries? Xray pulsars? Xray bursters?

7) What's wrong with Newton's Law of Gravity?

8) What is the "Principle of [Special] Relativity"?

9) What's weird/special about the speed of light? (more than one thing)

10) Why can't the speed of light depend on the motion of the source
of that light? (I gave a specific example in class and in the notes)

11) What is the PRINCIPLE OF EQUIVALENCE (General Relativity)?

12) What measurements show that gravity bends light?

13) Describe the thought experiment that says that gravity MUST bend light?

14) What is "Gravitational Redshift"?
    (Why would you ever put the question mark inside the quotation marks
    in the line above? What's wrong with editors and english teachers?)

15) What does "flickering" have to do with the understanding of compact
objects?

16) What does the concept of escape velocity have to do with the concept
of black holes?

17) What is the Event Horizon (Schwarzschild Radius)?

18) What is the "no hair" theorem of black holes?

19) Tell me what a distant observer sees when they watch an astronaut fall
into a black hole? What happens at the event horizon?

20) Tell me what an astronaut sees when they fall into a black hole?
What happens at the event horizon?

21) How do we find stellar-mass black holes?

22) What does it mean (and why does it happen) to be spaghettified or
noodlinzed? 

23) don't worry about HAWKING RADIATION in the notes from 2 years ago

24) Explain the DRAKE EQUATION.

25) how can we convince ourselves, observationally, that there
really are black holes?

26) What's microlensing, and what might it have to do with black holes?

27) What's a gamma ray burst observationally?

28) What's the best model we have for a gamma ray burst?

29) What's the observational connection to gamma ray bursts and supernovae?

30) What model might explain the connection mentioned in question 29?

31) What does the fact that gamma ray bursts are uniformly distributed
    on the sky tell us?

32) Tell us how we know that there are black holes in the centers of galaxies
(this is an observational question)

33) Tell us the story that links quasars to black holes in the centers of 
glaxies?