Planets
The name of this planet comes from a Germanic word for "ground"
What is Earth?
Bands of colored or white light in the atmosphere caused by charged particles from the Sun interacting with Earth's upper atmosphere. We have two types on Earth, the Borealis and Australis.
What is Aurora?
A small body of matter from outer space that enters the earth's atmosphere, becoming incandescent as a result of friction and appearing as a streak of light.
What is a Meteor?
This layer of the atmosphere contains the Ozone Layer
What is the Stratosphere?
It takes light approximately this long to travel from the Sun to Earth
What is 8 minutes?
This planet's atmosphere causes rains of sulfuric acid
What is Venus?
The name for a darker, cooler region on the Sun's photosphere
What is a Sunspot?
A small body of loosely packed ice, rock, gas, and cosmic dust that gives off a tail of gas and dust as it passes near the Sun
What is a Comet?
This layer lies above the mesopause, and is a region in which temperatures again increase with height.
What is the Thermosphere?
Pluto got demoted from planet to this, since it is not large enough to clear its own path of asteroids.
What is a Dwarf Planet?
The Great Red Spot on this planet is wider than the diameter of Earth
What is Jupiter?
A storm on the Sun's surface that sends out bursts of radiation and particles
What is a Solar Flare?
A small rocky object, greater than 1m in diameter, that orbits the sun
What is an Asteroid?
This is the lowest part of the atmosphere - the part we live in
What is the Troposphere?
The Asteroid Belt between these two planets contain most of the asteroids in our solar system
What are Mars and Jupiter?
The orbit of planets is this shape.
What is an Ellipse
The type of reaction that stars use to produce energy
What is Nuclear Fusion?
A small, rocky object, smaller than 1m in diameter, which orbits the Sun
What is a meteoroid?
This is the middle layer of the atmosphere; the prefix for it actually means "middle"
What is the Mesosphere?
This is the name of our galaxy...and the word "galaxy" itself is influenced by this name
What is the Milky Way?
The tallest mountain in our solar system, Olympus Mons, is on this planet
What is Mars?
The sun is comprised almost entirely of these two elements
What are Hydrogen and Helium?
A meteor that survives its passage through the earth's atmosphere such that part of it strikes the ground
What is a Meteorite?
This layer contains mainly oxygen and hydrogen atoms, but there are so few of them that they rarely collide
What is the Exosphere?
This is the region of the solar system outside of Neptune's orbit
What is the Kuiper Belt