A Look at the Cosmos Trivia Quiz

Answer: Dwarf planet

This is a great example of how little we really understand about the universe in which we, for some reason, find ourselves living in. Until 2006, Ceres was classified as an asteroid (though there was much disagreement about its status) but upon reclassifying what a planet actually is, Ceres was "promoted" to a dwarf planet at the same time that Pluto was "demoted" to dwarf status.

The reason that Ceres is not fully classified as a planet is because it contradicts one of the stipulations of planet status that the body must clear its orbit. Ceres obviously does not clear its orbit because it is surrounded by a huge number of asteroids that are housed in the asteroid belt!

Answer: Further

The Kuiper belt is a lot further away from the Sun than the asteroid belt. The latter can be found between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars whilst you would have to go all the way to Neptune, the 8th planet, to find the Kuiper belt. The asteroid belt is home to a few dwarf planets including Ceres, a body that accounts for almost 33% of the mass of the entire belt. The Kuiper belt is also home to dwarf planets including Pluto, a celestial body that was classified as a planet until 2006.

Note: I have been generous with the answers marked as correct: "further", "farther", "further from" and "further away" were all accepted even though the answer I was looking for was in the hint. I am just a nice guy! :)

Answer: Pluto does not clear its orbit

The new criteria outlining what is and is not a planet was very controversial. Pluto does not clear its orbit, that is there are bodies of similar size to Pluto, such as the larger Eris, nearby.

On a separate note, there is a wonderful diagram which shows how abnormal Pluto's orbit of the Sun is. From Mercury through Neptune, the eight planets travel around the Sun on the same plane. In other words, if you placed all the ellipses on a flat surface (this is difficult to imagine for something in space and even harder to explain!) then Mercury's elliptical orbit will fit inside Venus' orbit and so on. None of the elliptical orbits are at different angles (of any significance) so they would appear flat - a plane! That is until we reach Pluto! If the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all line up nicely, then Pluto likes to wander! In relation to the eight planets, Pluto's orbit rises above the plane at one focus and falls below the plane at the other focus. This led to Pluto being closer to the Sun than Neptune at times as Pluto's orbit intercepted that of Neptune's.

One of the old mnemonics used to go "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas". I can just imagine physics teachers scrambling for a piece of paper and a pencil trying desperately to come up with a new mnemonic for class the next day. Drops of perspiration on the forehead as they envisage standing in front of the class with nothing but "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine...". Nine what? Argh!

Answer: Comet

One of the most famous astrogeologists was Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, an astronaut who went to the moon along with Eugene Cernan as part of the Apollo 17 mission. His academic background was in geology and the Apollo 17 mission gave him the perfect opportunity to study the lunar surface.

Astrogeologists are also interested in comets and they truly are fascinating. They travel from the far reaches of the solar system and orbit the Sun due to the strength of the gravitational field caused by the star. A comet is made of, amongst other things, ice and so as the comet approaches the sun parts of it begin to melt or in some cases sublimate (change from a solid to a gas without going through the liquid state) and this results in the iconic tail.

Answer: Oort cloud

The Oort cloud is still a mystery to astronomers, astrophysicists and everybody else. If you have time to hunt around there are some great artists' impressions of what the current model of the Oort cloud is believed to be. By viewing such impressions the scale of the Universe becomes apparent because the Kuiper belt (the part of our solar system found further from the Sun than Neptune) occupies only a very tiny volume of the Oort cloud.

In fact the solar system pales into insignificance in comparison to the vast Oort cloud.

It really is the case of us being but just plankton in an ocean infinitely greater in volume than the Pacific, space!

Answer: Ferdinand Magellan

LMC stands for Large Magellanic Cloud and the middle word really is a nightmare to say when you are talking about the topic quite quickly. As can be seen this galaxy, which is classified as irregular, is named after the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan wasn't the first person to make note of the galaxy, that honour goes to Persia's 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, but the Portuguese explorer was the first to bring the astronomical feature to the attention of Western culture.

Answer: Messier

Charles Messier is now better known for this collection of astronomical objects than for his work with comets. The Crab Nebula is designated Messier 1 (M1) and this is a remnant of a supernova (implosion of a star). There are some great pictures of the Crab Nebula and I have to admit that M1 was my laptop background for quite some time!

The spiral galaxy found in the constellation Virgo is designated as Messier 90 (M90) after its discovery in the early 1780s. To put some perspective on how far from Earth M90 is we have to use light years. The distance between M90 and Earth is an eye-watering 60 million light years! Light travels at approximately 300,000,000 metres in a second, so you can only imagine that in 60 million years light would have travelled a massive multiple of 300,000,000 metres. The result in metres would be unbearable to use as it would be just too large, so instead astronomers use light years. That way the space scientists can use numbers in the region of 60 million instead of trillions and quadrillions.

Answer: Orion

Orion's Belt is part of the constellation, Orion, and it is a group of three stars which appear to form a belt around the waist of a hunter. Some well known stars in this constellation include Betelgeuse and Rigel. Orion is perhaps one of the best known constellations seen on the celestial map, it appears on the celestial equator and as such it is a constellation visible to all parts of the world. In Latin America, the group of three stars known as Orion's Belt is also called "The Three Marys".

The Horsehead Nebula can be found in approximately the same region of our view of the sky as the easternmost star of Orion's belt, Alnitak. Alnitak is actually a system of three stars and is very useful to astronomers attempting to find the impressive Horsehead Nebula. The nebula itself is a thick black cloud and within it, just as is the case with other nebulae, are brand new stars forming! The problem is that the thick blanket of dust obfuscates the newly forming stars such that we cannot see them with ordinary optical telescopes. To even get close to seeing the concealed stars we turn to telescopes that work in other areas of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum, such as infra-red (IR) radiation.

Answer: Radio

Admittedly not one of the more obvious acronyms, but an acronym it is: "quasi-stellar radio source". The name basically says what the body is and what it does; it is a distant galaxy which appears as a star (quasi-stellar) and is a major source of radio waves.

Another interesting fact about quasars is that when viewed with very powerful telescopes, a phenomenon called redshift is observed. This means that the body is moving away from Earth and that the quasar is a very distant object. This extremely large distance (one of the closest quasars is roughly 2.5 billion light years away) means that the quasars are extremely old astronomical bodies.

Answer: No

This part of astrology, and for many scientists any part of astrology, is not considered science. There is no substantial evidence to say that the combined gravitational force of a constellation of the zodiac, which is a group of totally unrelated stars, has a personal effect on you or anybody else.

There are a few issues with this pseudo-scientific concept. Firstly, let us say that the stars of Gemini are somehow related to each other. If this is the case, why would the gravitational force have an effect on you but not on someone standing two yards away from you just because you were born at different times of the year? The truth is it wouldn't. The second point shows that the first case is irrelevant because individual stars of a constellation are not related. The only thing that groups these stars together is the fact that they form a pretty picture in the sky. In reality, the stars are nowhere near each other, some of the stars are much further away from Earth than other stars of the same constellation! They only appear to be next to each other in our view of the sky because we can't perceive the depth of the stars very well because of the massive distances involved.