The Solar System Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which features of Mars are permanent stacks of water ice at both ends of the planet, overlain each winter by a temporary frosting of frozen carbon dioxide, dry ice, that sublimates away again in spring, causing the whole planet's air pressure to rise and fall with the seasons?

Question 2

Which is the largest moon of Neptune and the only large moon in the solar system that orbits its planet backwards, against the planet's spin, strong evidence that it did not form there but was captured from the Kuiper belt, and is being slowly dragged inward to eventual destruction?

Question 3

What is the name for the situation, extremely common among the moons of the solar system, in which a body's rotation period has been braked over time until it exactly matches its orbital period, so that it keeps one face turned permanently toward the object it circles, as the Moon does toward Earth?

Question 4

Which planet is the hottest in the solar system, its surface a furnace of around 465 degrees Celsius under a crushing carbon-dioxide atmosphere and clouds of sulphuric acid, even though it lies farther from the Sun than the smallest planet, which is cooler?

Question 5

Which mid-sized moon of Saturn is instantly recognisable for a single giant impact crater, about a third of the moon's own diameter, that gives it a striking resemblance to the Death Star space station from Star Wars?

Question 6

Which doughnut-shaped region of icy bodies lies just beyond Neptune, roughly 30 to 50 times Earth's distance from the Sun, and is home to Pluto, several other dwarf planets, and the source of most comets that return every few decades?

Question 7

Which event occurs at full moon when the Moon passes into the long shadow cast by the Earth, often turning a dim coppery or blood red rather than going black, because the only sunlight reaching it has skimmed through the Earth's atmosphere, which bends it inward and filters it to red?

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About The Solar System

The solar system is the Sun and everything gravity binds to it: eight planets, hundreds of moons, several dwarf planets, and uncountable asteroids, comets and grains of dust, all left over from the collapse of one cloud of gas 4.6 billion years ago. This quiz is a tour of about eighty of its members and features. Each question describes one, a planet, a moon, a surface feature, a small body, a phenomenon or a term, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains what it is, how we know, and the striking fact or the common mistake attached to it.

It works outward from the Sun. Mercury's baked and frozen rock; Venus and its runaway furnace; Mars with the tallest volcano and longest canyon anywhere; the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn with their storms, rings and swarms of moons; the tipped-over ice giants Uranus and Neptune. Then the moons that are worlds in their own right: volcanic Io, ocean-hiding Europa and Enceladus, hazy Titan with its methane lakes, backward-orbiting Triton. And the debris: the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt, the distant Oort cloud, comets and their tails, meteoroids and meteorites.

A recurring theme is that the solar system is a snapshot of a violent history. The Moon was blasted off a young Earth by a Mars-sized impact. Mercury and the Moon are cratered from an ancient bombardment. Saturn's rings may be debris from a shattered moon, young enough that dinosaurs saw a bare Saturn. Triton was stolen from the Kuiper belt. Uranus was knocked on its side. The planets themselves grew by countless collisions of smaller bodies.

It also gives real weight to the physics and the bookkeeping that make sense of it all: the astronomical unit and the light-minute; obliquity, eccentricity and what actually causes seasons; the frost line that split the small rocky planets from the gas giants; the Roche limit that shreds a moon into a ring; the Lagrange points where a telescope can park; tidal locking, libration, retrograde motion, spring and neap tides; and why a total solar eclipse is possible only because of a 400-to-400 coincidence that will not last forever.

The quiz also sorts out the confusions: meteoroid versus meteor versus meteorite, why Pluto was demoted, why an 'artery' rule about oxygen has an exception, that the asteroid belt is mostly empty space, that a comet's tail does not trail behind it but points away from the Sun. Because so much of the imagery for these worlds comes from space agencies and is in the public domain, questions carry a photograph wherever one helps without giving the answer away, often a picture of the parent planet for a question about one of its moons. Every claim has been checked against reliable sources, and the wording is kept plain.