Name Origins
The parsec is an abbreviation of these two words, which represent the distance an object needs to be from the earth to appear to change this angle in the sky throughout the year relative to the very distant background stars.
Parallax arcsecond
While Gaia BH1 is the closest known one to Earth at ~1,600 ly away, or ~400x further away than the nearest stars, Cygnus X-1 was the first of these to be discovered and later confirmed in 1973.
Stellar-mass Black Hole
In this 1999 movie, Gonzo attempts to discover his origins before he and Rizzo are captured by government officials and it's up to the rest to rescue them.
Muppets from Space
This icy Kuiper belt dwarf planet has yet to complete even half of its orbit around the sun since its discovery in 1930.
134340 Pluto
At perihelion, the Parker Solar Probe passes through this region of the sun, which is paradoxically far hotter (but less dense) than the photosphere. The PSP has approached within 9.86 R☉ from the center and holds the crown for fastest man-made object at 0.00064 c.
The corona
The only planet in the solar system with a name from the Greek pantheon, this planet's moons are all named after characters from the plays of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.
Uranus
This variety of neutron stars is distinguished from others by irregular magnetic axis which concentrates its light emission and its extreme regular spin, the fastest known completing a full rotation in only 1.3959 milliseconds.
Pulsars
This 1987 film about a heroic mercenary and his sidekick who must rescue spoiled Princess Vespa of Druidia and her droid from the villainous President Skroob has a sequel set for release in 2027.
Spaceballs
Geysers from the famous Tiger Stripes on this moon in the densest part of Saturn's E-ring eject hundreds of kilograms of water every second, which has suffused the upper atmosphere of the planet. That makes this the only moon in the solar system to influence the atmosphere of its host planet.
Enceladus
This planet is paradoxically the most fuel-expensive to enter orbit, as tremendous delta-v is required to slow down. However, that didn't stop the MESSENGER probe from entering orbit in 2011 and de-orbiting on its surface in 2015.
Mercury
Started at Caltech before joining the US army and later NASA, this facility deliberately avoided the word 'rocket' in its name because it lacked respectability at the time due to the explosion of space-themed science fiction in the 1930's.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Also termed free-floating planets, this dark and 'unsavory' title describes objects not gravitationally bound to a star, whether ejected from its parent or somehow formed under its own gravity. It is unknown how many could be in the Milky Way, but estimates range from billions to trillions.
Rogue planets
Described by the director as 'kinda the Garden of Eden with teeth and claws,' the setting of this franchise is in orbit of the fictional exoplanet Polyphemus, itself in orbit of the real star Alpha Centauri A.
Avatar
Discovered in 1801 in a race to find a theoretical missing planet between Mars and Jupiter, this cryovolcanic dwarf planet brought about the need for the Minor-planet designation catalog. It was later given the designation 1 in the catalog in honor of being the first discovered.
1 Ceres
433 Eros was the first one of these with a successful landing in 2001 by NEAR Shoemaker, while 101955 Bennu was the first to have a sample extracted and returned to Earth in 2023 by OSIRIS-REx.
Asteroid
The closest red supergiant to Sol and most likely source of the next naked-eye visible 'sun at night' supernova, this star's name in English comes from the Arabic for 'the hand of Orion,' though it's more in the vicinity of his shoulder.
Betelgeuse
Frustrated in his hunt for comets, this French man published the Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters in 1774, a list of non-comet objects that later grew to 110 and included the likes of M1, M83, and M31, aka the Crab Nebula, the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, and Andromeda respectively.
Charles Messier
The cancelled sequel to this 1982 summer blockbuster carried the subtitle Nocturnal Fears and would have featured an evil albino species that abduct the children who then need to phone their friend for rescue from the homeworld. The director later opined that the sequel 'would do nothing but rob the original of its virginity.'
E.T.
The internal ocean of this largest of the Galilean moons potentially contains more liquid water than all of Earth's oceans. Its liquid metallic core makes it the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field.
Ganymede
The Cassini probe carried with it the Huygens lander which in 2005 transmitted video of its descent through this Saturn moon's dense atmosphere back to Earth with a one-way time delay of over 1 hour.
Titan
This TNO is 99% the diameter of and 25% more massive than its Cthonic neighbor. After discovery in 2005, it became the last dwarf planet named from the Greek pantheon after the strife it caused the IAU, starting arguments that still echo today.
136199 Eris
This mysterious "zone" is the name of the area behind the Milky Way's core obscured by its interstellar dust. It was coined by Edwin Hubble, presumably because you would want to 'avert' your telescopes. Behind it lies the equally mysteriously named Great Attractor.
The Zone of Avoidance
The director of this 2014 movie later regretted removing gravitational waves from his brother's screenplay as the detection mechanism for the wormhole when LIGO reported the first direct observations of gravitational waves from black holes only one year after its release.
Interstellar
This moon accounts for more than 99.5% of all known mass to orbit Neptune and is more massive than all other known moons in the solar system smaller than it combined. The surface is covered in 55% annealed frozen nitrogen as cryovolcanoes paint it with water and carbon dioxide ices.
Triton
The first probe to orbit a comet, 67P, it was named in the hopes that it would result in a better understanding of the early solar system. In homage to its namesake, it carried a micro-etched disc inscribed with 6,500 pages of language translations.
Rosetta