Solar System Extrema
Olympus Mons, on Mars
What is the largest mountain (extinct volcano) in the solar system?
Another name for this asterism, or pattern of stars, is the Drinking Gourd.
What is the Big Dipper?
If you want to climb giant ice mountains in an atmosphere that rains methane, you should book a trek to this moon of Saturn.
What is Titan?
The search for habitable planets orbiting a black hole was first explored in this 2014 movie starring Matthew McConahay, but is now a subject of actual theoretical investigations.
What is Interstellar?
A transient astronomical event that occurs in a compact binary system when two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole merge into each other, and release not only electromagnetic radiation, but gravitational radiation.
What is a kilonova?
The planet with the hottest surface temperatures in the solar system.
What is Venus?
In Japanese, this young, open star cluster is called Subaru.
What is the Pleiades Star Cluster?
This probe, part of the Cassini Mission to Saturn, made the farthest landing from Earth that a spacecraft has ever made.
What is the Huygens Probe?
Growing food in a greenhouse on this red planet, depicted in this 2015 film starring Matt Damon, is actually being studied by NASA, ESA, and other space agencies for future off-Earth colonization.
What is The Martian?
Betelgeuse (or Antares), the final stage of a massive star's life, characterized by layers of fusion in a compact core and a very large, cool envelope.
What is a red supergiant?
The Great Red Spot on Jupiter
What is the largest, most stable storm system in the solar system?
The end of life for a supermassive blue giant star.
What is a black hole? (a stellar black hole)
The first female African American astronaut, and the only African American scientist (in real life) to have been a guest on the Star Trek TV series.
Who is Dr. Mae Jemison?
A circumbinary planet, like the fictional planet Tatooine in this 1979 movie, has actually been discovered by the Kepler Mission.
What is Star Wars?
An extremely luminous active galactic nucleus, in which a super massive black hole with mass ranging from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun is surrounded by a gaseous accretion disk.
What is a quasar?
This planet has the fastest wind speeds recorded in the solar system (more than 1200 mph).
What is Neptune?
Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me!
What is the mnemonic for remembering stellar spectral classes?
Famously demoted from its status as the ninth planet, this trans-Neptunian object is actually a binary planet system with four satellites.
What is the Pluto System? (or What is Pluto?)
This 1995 film starring Tom Hanks, about stranded astronauts trying to get home to Earth, is actually a true story.
What is Apollo 13?
The model that describes how our universe originated.
What is the Big Bang? (Big BangTheory)
This planet has the most extreme seasons because of its axial tilt of about 98 degrees.
What is Uranus?
The process through which a rotating, convecting, and electrically conducting fluid can maintain a magnetic field of a star or planet over astronomical time scales.
What is the dynamo theory? (effect, mechanism, process)
These are the first human-made objects to actually enter interstellar space.
What are Voyagers I and II? (What are the Voyager Missions?)
In this 1984 movie of Frank Hubert’s 3-novel series, the Makers produce faster-than-light travel by folding spacetime, a method proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre using Einstein’s field equations.
What is Dune?
The brightest and most energetic electromagnetic events known in the universe, thought to be released during a supernova explosion when a high mass star implodes to form a neutron star or black hole.
What are Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs)?