Explore planets, stars, galaxies, astronauts, and cosmic mysteries in this ultimate space quiz.
Questions
18
Reward
220
XP
80
Entry
95
This quiz has two halves that require different kinds of knowledge. The first is astronomy: identifying planets by their defining characteristics, understanding what a galaxy is, what happens when a massive star collapses, how astronomers measure the enormous gaps between things, and why one former planet is no longer counted as one. The second is history, meaning the twentieth-century race to leave the atmosphere and the firsts that came out of it, along with the agencies and the orbiting laboratory that followed. Eighteen questions, rated Medium. The astronomy half rewards curiosity and the history half rewards having absorbed the Cold War story, and most people are noticeably stronger at one than the other. It stays at the level of widely reported facts throughout, so nothing here requires having studied the subject.
Background and what to expect. No answers given away.
Each planet in the solar system has something it is known for: a colour, a ring system, a size, a temperature, a position. Questions here describe that feature and ask for the planet, which is much easier than being asked to order them.
The trap is that the innermost planet and the hottest one are not the same, for reasons to do with atmosphere rather than proximity.
The exploration questions concentrate on a small number of milestones: the first satellite, the first human in orbit, the first person to set foot on another world, and the agencies and countries behind each.
Two of those firsts belong to one country and two to another, and the Cold War context is why they are remembered so precisely.
This is the most common misconception in astronomy and it gets asked directly. The unit describes how far light travels in a year, despite the name containing a period of time.
Related: the object formed when a massive star collapses has a name that describes what it does to light rather than what it is made of.
An entity that was taught to a generation as the ninth planet was reclassified in 2006 when the definition of a planet was formalised, and it now belongs to a different category.
Questions about it are asking about that reclassification, which remains one of the best-known scientific decisions of the century.
Two planets take most of the superlatives between them, and a third takes the rest. When a question asks which is largest, hottest, furthest or most distinctive, the plausible-sounding wrong answer is usually the neighbouring one.
Developer & Quiz Editor
Omik Babariya is a full-stack developer and quiz editor at Unihfy Games. He writes most of the quiz questions, works on the sports and entertainment articles, and has built and tested a number of the games on the site.
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