Our Solar System
The galaxy we inhabit.
What is the Milky Way?
An astronomical body with a gravitational pull so intense that light cannot escape it.
What is a black hole?
The theory that the sun was the center of our galaxy.
What is the heliocentric theory?
It is the central star in our solar system.
What is the sun?
The fifth planet from the sun.
What is Jupiter?
A giant cloud of dust and gas in space. Some are created from the debris emitted from a supernova, or explosion of a dying star.
What is a nebula?
The year mankind landed on the moon in the NASA Apollo 11 Mission.
What is 1969?
This is a cluster of stars in the night sky that we recognize as certain patterns.
What is a constellation?
This planet is nicknamed the Red Giant.
What is Mars?
This is our closest major galactic neighbor. The galaxy shares a name with a princess who was chained to a rock to be sacrificed to the Greek God, Posideon.
What is Andromeda?
The woman that manually verified the calculated trajectory for John Glenn's orbit around the Earth in 1962. She is the main character from the movie Hidden Figures.
Who is Katherine Johnson?
The two main chemical elements in a star. On the periodic table, they are the first 2 elements.
What are Hydrogen and Helium?
The hottest planet in our solar system. It is also known as the Morning or Evening star at times.
What is Venus?
This small space rock burns up in this atmosphere and creates a shooting star. It is made of frozen gas, rocks, and debris from the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud typically.
What is a meteoroid?
The first American woman to be an astronaut.
Who is Sally Ride?
This is the brightest star in the sky. It shares a name with a character who was imprisoned in Azkaban in the Harry Potter series.
What is Sirius/ the Dog Star?
These two planets do not have any natural satellites.
What are Mercury and Venus?
**Their proximity to the sun affects their own hill spheres (the individual gravitational pull a planet can exercise) and natural satellites would only be absorbed by the sun.
This is considered a natural satellite to Pluto because they orbit around a common center of mass. In Greek mythology, it shares the name with the ferryman that rows across the river styx to enter the underworld.
What is Charon?
The inventor of the telescope.
Who is Hans Lippershay?
**Galileo Galilei improved it and used it to study the stars.
This is the closest star to our sun.
What is Proxima Centauri?
**Proxima Centauri is apart of the Alpha Centauri star system.