Celestial Bodies
This planet is known as the “Red Planet” because of its rusty iron‑rich soil.
What is Mars?
This is the closest planet to the Sun.
What is Mercury?
This famous space telescope, launched in 1990, has delivered stunning deep‑space images.
What is the Hubble Space Telescope?
This fundamental force keeps your feet on the ground and holds planets in orbit.
What is gravity?
This American astronaut was the first human to step onto the Moon.
Who is Neil Armstrong?
This bright star, also called Alpha Canis Majoris, is the brightest in our night sky.
What is Sirius?
This astronomical unit of distance is defined as the average gap between Earth and the Sun, about 150 million kilometers. What is its two‑letter abbreviation?
What is an AU?
This NASA probe flew past Pluto in 2015, giving us our first close‑up views.
What is New Horizons?
The spherical boundary around a black hole where nothing, not even light, can escape.
What is the event horizon?
This Soviet cosmonaut was the first human to orbit Earth in 1961.
Who is Yuri Gagarin?
These objects are too small to fuse hydrogen, but can burn deuterium briefly. They’re often called “failed stars.”
What are brown dwarfs?
This Jupiter moon is the most volcanically active body in the entire Solar System.
What is Io?
This was the name of the first Filipino microsatellite, launched into orbit in 2016.
What is Diwata‑1?
This law, first written by Isaac Newton, says that the attraction between two masses depends on the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them.
What is the Universal Law of Gravitation?
This Italian scientist was the first to point a telescope at the sky and discovered Jupiter’s four largest moons.
Who is Galileo Galilei?
These incredibly luminous objects are powered by supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies. They can outshine entire galaxies.
What are quasars?
This empty region in the main asteroid belt, cleared by Jupiter’s gravitational pull, is named after a 19th‑century American astronomer.
What is a Kirkwood gap?
This type of telescope uses a curved primary mirror to gather and focus light (as opposed to lenses).
What is a reflecting telescope?
This effect, predicted by General Relativity, describes the bending of light by massive objects like galaxies and clusters.
What is gravitational lensing?
Appointed as the agency's chief in January 2026, this is the current Director General of the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA)
Who is Dr. Gay Jane P. Perez?
This binary pulsar system, discovered in 1974, provided the first indirect evidence for gravitational waves and earned its discoverers a Nobel Prize.
What is the Hulse–Taylor binary?
This exact 1:2:4 orbital resonance between three of Jupiter’s large moons causes tidal heating on the innermost one, making it so volcanically active.
What is the Laplace resonance?
This ground‑based facility in Chile uses four 8.2‑meter telescopes that can work as an interferometer.
What is the VLT (Very Large Telescope)?
This criterion, named after a British physicist, determines the minimum mass for a molecular cloud to collapse and form stars.
What is the Jeans instability? (or Jeans mass/criterion)
This Soviet cosmonaut performed the first spacewalk in 1965, beating the Americans by a few months.
Who is Alexei Leonov?