White Dwarfs & Planetary Nebulae

Currently, the Sun is fusing ___

• hydrogen into helium
• helium into hydrogen
• helium into carbon
• hydrogen into carbon

Eventually, the Sun will fuse helium into carbon, along with a dash of ___

• neon and lithium
• silicon and neon
• oxygen and neon
• oxygen and silicon

The Sun's power will be switched off once the core is nearly pure ___

• helium
• lithium
• carbon
• silicon

How long from now until the Sun’s outer layers are gone and our star is just its core?

• about 8 million years
• about 80 million years
• about 8 billion years
• about 80 billion years

Once helium fusion stops, the dominant force in supporting the core of a star is called ___

• neutron degradation pressure
• photon depravity pressure
• electron degeneracy pressure
• proton dissoluteness pressure

The Sun, when its core has contracted to about the size of Earth, will be classified as ___

• a white dwarf
• a blue dwarf
• a white subgiant
• a blue subgiant

A single cubic centimeter of a white dwarf, the size of a six-sided die, has a mass of ___

• a thousand grams — ten metric tons
• a million grams — ten metric tons
• a thousand grams — one metric ton
• a million grams — one metric ton

If you have a mass of 75 kg, and you stood on the surface of a white dwarf, you’d weigh ___

• 7.5 tons
• 75 tons
• 750 tons
• 7,500 tons

Because white dwarfs are so small, they’re actually ___

• quite cool
• quite faint
• quite hot
• quite bright

An expanding, glowing shell of gas around an aging star is called ___

• a dwarf nebula
• a planetary nebula
• a dwarf nimbus
• a planetary nimbus