Space facts trivia questions - Scroll down for answers.
- How old is the universe?
- What is a black hole?
- How far is the nearest black hole?
- What is a supernova?
- What is a quasar?
- What is a neutron star?
- What is a brown dwarf?
- What is a red giant?
- How hot is the sun?
- What is a solar flare?
- What are cosmic rays?
- What is the Van Allen belt?
- What is the most common element found in the universe?
- What is Jupiter made of?
- How many moons does Jupiter have?
- How long is a day on Mercury?
- How many stars are there in in the big dipper?
- How many stars are in the little dipper?
- What is a constellation?
- How many named constellations are there?
- What is the big red spot on Jupiter?
- Where is the element gold come from?
- What is a parsec?
Answers to Daily Trivia Quiz # 106 - Outer
Space
- In a study published in the journal Science, a team of
researchers says the universe is between 11.2 billion and 20 billion
years old.
- A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing can
escape, even light.
- As of now the closest known one is thought to lie at about 1,600
light years from Earth.
- A supernova is a stellar explosion which produces an extremely
bright object made of plasma that declines to invisibility over
weeks or months.
- The scientific consensus is that quasars are powered by material
falling into super massive black holes in the nuclei of distant
galaxies.
- Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of some massive stars.
- Brown dwarfs are sub-stellar objects with a mass below that
necessary to maintain hydrogen-burning nuclear fusion reactions in
their cores.
- They are stars of 0.4 - 10 times the mass of the Sun which have
exhausted their supply of hydrogen in their cores and switched to
fusing hydrogen in a shell outside the core.
- The core of the Sun is 27,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The
surface of the Sun, is only 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
- A solar flare is an explosion on the Sun that happens when
energy stored in twisted magnetic fields is suddenly released.
- Cosmic rays are high energy charged particles, originating in
outer space, that travel at nearly the speed of light and strike the
Earth from all directions.
- The Van Allen Radiation Belt is a torus of energetic charged
particles (plasma) around Earth, trapped by Earth's magnetic field.
- Hydrogen
- Jupiter is about 90% hydrogen and 10% helium (by numbers of
atoms, 75/25% by mass) with traces of methane, water, ammonia and
"rock"
- Jupiter has 63 known satellites (as of Feb 2004): the four large
Galilean moons plus many more small ones some of which have not yet
been named.
- Mercury rotates three times in two of its years.
- The Big Dipper is a group of seven bright stars, 3 which form a
handle and 4 which form a bowl.
- The little dipper has 6 stars.
- A constellation is a group of stars that, when seen from Earth,
form a pattern.
- There are 88 constellations.
- A: The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a hurricane-like storm
system. It is large enough that two Earths could fit across it.
- Gold only comes from Super Novae.
- The parsec is a unit of length used in astronomy, approximately
equal to 3.261 light years.
