Solar System
Number of planets in the Solar System
What are 8?
The name of the mission that took us to the Moon
What is Apollo?
These are the dark areas on the Sun's surface
What are Sunspots?
This is the brightest star in the night sky
What is Sirius?
This scientist developed the telescope and confirmed heliocentrism
Who is Galileo Galilei?
This planet has a day that is longer than its year
What is Venus?
This spacecraft was the first to travel past our Solar System
What is Voyager 1?
The Sun’s rays strike the Earth most directly around here
What is the Equator?
This is the plane of the solar system in the night sky
What is the Ecliptic?
This professor won a Nobel Prize for her work on discovering Sagittarius A*.
Who is Professor Ghez?
This is the cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances 2,000 to 200,000 AU (never directly observed)
What is The Oort Cloud?
This was NASA’s first “planet-hunting” mission
What is Kepler / Kepler space telescope?
How long is the Solar Cycle (the cycle that the Sun’s magnetic field goes through)
What is 11 years?
The most active meteor shower that occurs annually around mid-August
What are the Perseids?
These were first detected in 2015 by LIGO
What are Gravitational waves?
This moon harbors a subsurface ocean beneath its icy crust
What is Europa?
This space Rover sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to itself on its host planet
What is Curiosity (on Mars)?
The largest recorded solar storm to hit Earth
What is the Carrington Event?
This is the asterism defined by the three stars, Vega, Altair, and Deneb
What is the Summer Triangle?
In 2024, the James Webb Space Telescope captured detailed images of this planet's auroras for the first time.
What is Neptune? (using Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph)
This is the most massive known dwarf planet
What is Eris?
This NASA mission performed a flyby exploration of both Pluto and the most distant object ever explored by a spacecraft
What is New Horizons?
The Sun’s current life cycle stage
What is the Main Sequence?
This is what causes stars to twinkle when viewed from Earth
What is astronomical scintillation/ atmospheric interference?
The first one of these space objects was discovered/confirmed in 1995
What is an Exoplanet (51 Pegasi b)?