Small Objects
This famous short-period comet is mentioned in the song Second Chance by Shinedown.
What is Halley’s Comet?
This is the furthest planet from the sun.
What is Neptune?
This bright star in the constellation Lyra has an infrared excess caused by a debris disk and is often used as a photometric calibration standard.
What is Vega?
This spacecraft will carry the Artemis II astronauts around the dark side of the Moon in a few weeks.
What is Orion?
This star earned its name after ancient astronomers compared its color to Mars.
What is Antares?
This moon is so close in mass to its dwarf planet companion that their center of gravity is not within either body’s radius.
What is Charon?
The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy.
What is ~100,000 light years?
This object at the center of the Milky Way is a ~4 million solar-mass black hole whose properties were confirmed through long-term stellar orbit measurements.
What is Sagittarius A*?
This spacecraft made the closest approach to the Sun by a man-made object in December 2024.
What is Parker Solar Probe?
This 16th century astronomer made what were at the time, the most refined astronomical measurements and observations every recorded.
Who is Tycho Brahe?
These two moons of Mars are believed to be captured from the Main Asteroid Belt.
What are Phobos and Deimos?
Mars is approximately this percentage of the mass of Earth.
What is ~10%?
This well-known supernova remnant in Taurus contains a rapidly rotating neutron star at its center and is a strong source of synchrotron radiation?
What is the Crab Nebula?
Launched in 1971, this Russian spacecraft was humanity’s first space station.
What is Salyut 1?
Uranus was discovered in 1781 by this astronomer, who was also a composer.
Who is William Herschel?
This cometary object was the second observed interstellar object and passed through our Solar System in 2019.
What is 2I/Borisov?
Humans could fly on this object in the Solar System by flapping a set of homemade wings from the surface.
What is Titan?
This nearby active galaxy was the first galaxy discovered with a relativistic jet and is a strong radio source located in the Virgo Cluster.
What is Messier 87?
Both Voyagers 1 & 2 were launched with a phonograph carrying music from diverse cultures around Earth. What is the common name for these records?
What are the Voyager Golden Records?
The 1957 Nobel Prize winners, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, were students of the 1983 laureate at the University of Chicago. Who was this?
Who is Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar?
The Deep Impact mission crashed into an comet to study its interior composition in 2005. What was the name of this comet?
What is Tempel 1?
This galaxy cluster’s X-ray emission and gravitational lensing independently demonstrate the separation of baryonic matter and dark matter, making it one of the strongest empirical arguments for dark matter’s existence.
What is the Bullet Cluster? (1E 0657-558)
This high-redshift object was once the most distant known galaxy, discovered via gravitational lensing, with a redshift of approximately z ≈ 11, pushing observations into the epoch of reionization.
What is GN-z11?
This probe, dropped by Cassini in 2005, was the first human spacecraft to land in the outer solar system.
What is Huygens probe?
This astronomer was the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist. Her contributions include the discovery of several comets.
Who is Caroline Herschel?