Quiz time!

But fear not! Before you begin suffering through those mind-altering flashbacks of pop quizzes you were forced to take in school, know this: This will not be graded, no letters will be sent home. You are only required to think, have fun, and simply classify the following statements as true or false.

1. The Sun burns stuff. It’s really nothing more than a big fat fire.

This is a common belief. And it makes common sense if you think about it. We see fires all over the place, from the fireplace to the forests. And we see the bright hot surface of the sun looking pretty similar. So the sun must be burning fuel just like these terrestrial conflagrations, correct?

Not really. The sun is hot because of a process called nuclear fusion. That’s when tiny atoms like hydrogen are smashed into other tiny atoms and fuse together to make bigger atoms like helium. When this happens some of the mass of the tiny critters is converted into enormous amounts of energy.

The “burning” the sun does down at its core is more like what goes on in a thermonuclear device, à la the fusion bomb. But instead of mere pounds of bomb material converted to energy, the sun converts over 4 million tons of matter into energy every second! And amazingly, even at this rate, the sun has enough fusion material left to “burn” for billions of years. Answer: False

2. Meteor showers rain down havoc on the earth! Everybody duck!

Meteor showers can be very dramatic fire-in-the-sky events but they are thoroughly harmless. They are just dusty debris from passed-by comets slamming into the atmosphere of the Earth. On average they are about the size of a grain of sand. But get them going at speeds of tens of miles per second and they can light up in a long fiery trail.

Most all the “shooting stars” we see are like this – whether part of a meteor shower or the strays we see occasionally flying solo through the night sky. They rarely make it to the ground, but their vaporized carcasses do give us tens of tons of extra new dust each day! Think of that next time you’re dusting behind the bookcase: you are probably wiping up some comet gut particles along with all the rest of the schmutz. Answer: False.

3. An asteroid or comet slamming into Earth will destroy the planet!!!

Imagine driving down the freeway at a good clip. Suddenly, without warning, a savage nectar-sucking butterfly flies right into the direction of your oncoming vehicle! Too late to react, the butterfly smashes into your front end splitting your car in two, both halves now careening off the road in different directions in a duel fireball of destruction.

This won’t happen, of course. The mass of the butterfly is way too small to cause any damage to your car other than an unsightly gooey mess. Asteroids and comets, even the bigger ones, are just miles, maybe a couple tens of miles across on average. When they hit Earth, which stretches thousands of miles through, other than leaving an unsightly crater they don’t do much damage to the planet at all. But they can really hurt the atmosphere.

Once they plough through Earth’s atmosphere and into its mantle they explode and hurl molten material literally all over the planet. This worldwide firefall ignites infernos everywhere, which pollutes the air on a global scale and shrouds us in darkness. Rainfall comes down as acid rain now, poisoning waters everywhere. Plant life suffers greatly. Being the bottom of the food chain, plants directly impact all the rest of life on earth. Lose those and mass starvation runs rampant.

Moreover, the sudden climate changes affect the complex, sensitive creatures the most, driving many to extinction. Earth is not a fun place to be for years. But the planet itself spins on, essentially unaffected. Answer: False.

Well, how did you do this time? Don’t worry if you got most wrong; these are all common misunderstandings. And, as my parents used to say, there’s more where that came from! In coming seasons we’ll try and debunk some more of these cosmic misconceptions.

Until next time, clear skies!