Basic Astronomy

The ______ Galaxy, also known as M31, is a barred spiral galaxy and the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way

The ____ Cloud is believed to be a giant spherical shell surrounding the Sun, planets and Kuiper Belt Objects.

A ____ is a massive explosion that occurs when a star reaches the end of its life.

A _____ is a region of space with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, including light, can escape

The first men to walk on the moon were Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr. and Neil ______ who landed on July 20, 1969 as part of the Apollo 11 mission

The ______ program is an American scientific program that employs two interstellar probes. They were launched in 1977 to take advantage of a favorable planetary alignment to explore the two gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and potentially also the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune - to fly near them while collecting data for transmission back to Earth.

_______ is the most significant interaction between objects at the macroscopic scale, and it determines the motion of planets, stars, galaxies, and even light.

Jupiter's Great_______ is a giant storm that's been shrinking over the past few decades.

_____ is the hottest planet in our solar system because of its thick atmosphere, which is made up of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide

Space is almost a ______, so sound waves can't travel through it. This means that you can't hear stars explode

Yuri ______ from the Soviet Union was the first human in space. His vehicle, Vostok 1 circled Earth at a speed of 27,400 kilometers per hour with the flight lasting 108 minutes

What was the name of the 2016 American biographical drama film that detailed the lives of three female African-American mathematicians: Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson as they worked at NASA during the Space Race?

When a star is dying and has run out of hydrogen fuel for nuclear fusion, it becomes a _____

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was the ____ impactor, which hit Earth 66 million years ago

_____ are giant clouds of dust and gas in space. Some ____ are formed from the gas and dust thrown out by dying stars, while others are regions where new stars are forming.

The three main types of telescopes are refracting, reflecting and _____

The ____ death of the universe is a theory about how the universe will eventually reach a state of maximum entropy and no thermodynamic free energy

____ was the first dog to orbit the Earth, she went into space in November 1957 aboard the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2:

The ________ is an 2008 novel by the Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin. It is the first novel in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. The series portrays a fictional past, present, and future wherein Earth encounters an alien civilization from a nearby system of three Sun-like stars orbiting one another.

The International Space Station (ISS) is a large, orbiting space laboratory that serves as a platform for scientific research. In what year was it launched?

The Tunguska explosion on June 30, 1908, was the largest ____ impact in recorded history. It flattened 830 square miles (2,150 sq km) of Siberian forest.

A comet has four parts, the nucleus, the coma, the ion tail, and the ____tail.

A comets nucleus is composed of rock, dust, and frozen _____.

A comets coma is a large, dusty_______surrounding the nucleus, made up of sublimated gas mixed with dust

A comet has two tails. The plasma trail (ion tail) which draws a straight line like a broom, and which comprises electrons and ions that are ionized by the sun's ______ radiation.

With comets, the sun's radiation heats the comet's ___, causing the ice to sublimate into gas and dust.

The largest mountain on Mars is ____ Mons, which is also the tallest mountain and volcano in the solar system.

China's first long-term space station, _______ is a modular design that orbits between 210 and 280 miles above Earth's surface. The station is operated by the China Manned Space Agency.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a large, versatile observatory that orbits Earth and is used to study the cosmos. In what year was it that was it launched?

The biggest star in the universe (that we know of), is _____ a variable hypergiant with a radius around 1,700 times larger than the radius of the sun.

Mars has two moons, they are Phobos and ____?

What Florentine astronomer was accused of heresy in the 1600s for his controversial thought?

The closest star to us is our very own Sun. The next closest star is Proxima _____.

Our sun orbits around the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy at an average velocity of 828,000 km/hr. How many millions of years does it take to make one complete orbit around the Milky Way?