Space Quiz – Questions & Answers

A planet is a celestial body that obeys the following criteria: It must be in orbit around the Sun, it must have a (nearly) round shape and it must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

Question: How many planets are in our solar system?

A day is the time it takes for a planet to rotate once around its own axis. A year is the time it takes for a planet to orbit the sun.

Question: On which planet, if any, is a day longer than a year?

When Earth was very young it is believed to have collided with a Mars-sized object. The impact is thought to be the origin of our current moon.

Question: What is the name of the Mars-sized object that collided with Earth?

The universe contains billions of galaxies and hot stars, huge amounts of cold dust and radiation. In between all this stuff you find empty space and large voids with no atoms.

Question: What is the average temperature in space?

A black hole is an object with such high gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. Black holes come in all kinds of sizes. Some are small, some are big, some are super big. At the center of our galaxy lies a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A*.

What is the mass of Sagittarius A* (compared to our sun)?

The sunlight that hits your face is emitted from the sun.

How long does it take for light to travel from the Sun’s core to the surface?

Galaxies are huge structures of stars, dust, gas, black holes, and all that other good space stuff. They are be shaped like an ellipse or a spiral, and if they bump into each other they lose their shape and become irregular. We often say that our closest proper neighboring galaxy is Andromeda.

True or False: Our neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, is bigger than our galaxy, Milky Way.

A moon is an object that orbits something that’s not a star, for instance a planet.

Question: How many moons does Pluto have?