AST 101: Quiz 5 Solutions Stars A and B have the same apparent brightness, but star B is twice as far

away as star A. Star A is A 1/4 as luminous as star B. Use the inverse-square law. If you halve the distance to star B, it apparent brightness increases by a factor of 4. At the same distance, the ratio of brightnesses is the ratio of luminosities. Identify the FALSE statement. The Greenhouse Effect B causes the Earth's albedo to decrease. Albedo is the reflectivity of the Earth. It has nothing directly to do with the greenhouse effect (although warming the Earth is thought to increase cloudiness, which would increase the albedo). Stars are stable for billions of years on the main sequence because D gravity exactly offsets the pressure of the hot gas. This is a better answer than C, that stars they are slowly, almost imperceptibly, contracting, because the "almost impercentible" would be true only if you could watch for hundreds of millions of years. The Sun will continue on the main sequence, fusing hydrogen into helium, for another 5 billion years. So why is the Earth expected to become uninhabitable in only another 1 billion years or so? Earth will get too hot. The Sun is getting brighter, so the Earth is heating up. In a billion years, even in the absence of a greenhouse effect, the average surface temperature on Earth will reach the boiling point of water. Which is the more correct statement, and why? As They Might Be Giants explain (see the notes to the song "The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas"), the Sun is so hot that all the elements are ionized. This makes the Sun a plasma rather than a gas.