Not in a million years! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Megaannum

The word 'megaannum' literally means a million years and so is the only true unit of time here. Both the light-year and the angstrom are units of distance, with the light-year being equal to the distance that a particle travelling at the speed of light (300,000,000 metres per second) would cover in a year, around 9 quadrillion metres, while the angstrom is a ten billionth of a metre. The angstrom is often used as the scale for measuring the size of atoms and molecules, as well as for wavelengths.

The erg is actually a unit of energy equal to 100 nanojoules in SI units.

Answer: Edwin Hubble

The law itself is actually just called 'Hubble's law' and tells us that the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us. This means that the universe is still expanding. The other astronomers are famous for various reasons:

Tycho Brahe was a pioneering astronomer from Denmark who is well known for his observations of planets, stars and (super)novae, a term he coined because he thought it was the birth of a new star.

Chandrasekhar is perhaps best known for the 'Chandrasekhar limit', which is the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star and is around 1.38 solar masses. If a white dwarf exceeds this mass then it is likely to collapse and form a neutron star or a black hole.

Finally Giovanni Cassini is the namesake of the Cassini Division, a gap between the A Ring and the B ring of Saturn that he discovered in 1675.

Answer: Red Giant

A red giant is a relatively cool star in comparison to many others, emphasised by its red colour as opposed to yellow or white, with a surface temperature of around 5000 Kelvin. Although the average red giant has a diameter that is around 200 times larger than the sun, the mass of a red giant is typically a maximum of 10 solar masses, suggesting that red giants are significantly less dense than a main sequence star such as the sun.

Unfortunately the sun will one day become a red giant and engulf the area of space that the Earth currently occupies but don't fret because that is several billion years away!

Answer: Andromeda

Although the term 'local group' is used to describe the group of galaxies in which we find ourselves, it is actually around 10 million light-years across, or for those who like more technical units, a little over 3 million parsecs.

Despite the enormity of these distances, astronomers have been able to observe that the local group is in a dumbbell shape with the centre of mass being somewhere between the two largest galaxies (the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies) and also that the total mass of the local group is around 1 trillion times the mass of the sun.

Arguably the most famous galaxy outside of the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy (M31 in the Messier catalogue) is also spiral galaxy and contains around 1 trillion stars, more than twice the number contained in the Milky Way (200-400 billion).

Answer: Haumea

Haumea is actually one of five dwarf planets found in our solar system, along with Eris, Makemake, Ceres and most famously Pluto. A dwarf planet is defined as an object of planetary mass that has achieved hydrostatic equilibrium, but which has not cleared it's own path around the sun (and in addition is not a satellite). Haumea was originally called Santa, as it was discovered just after Christmas in 2004. However, the name Haumea comes from the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth.

Alpha Centauri is the brightest star in the constellation of Centaurus, and is actually a binary star system, found at a distance of around 1.34 parsecs. The Horsehead nebula is found in the constellation of Orion, at a distance of around 460 parsecs. Vega is the fifth brightest star in the night sky, found in the constellation of Lyra at a distance of around 7.7 parsecs.

Answer: A black hole

The Earth, the sun and the rest of the solar system are found at a distance of 8-8.7kpc from the centre of the galaxy, where kpc stands for kiloparsec (1000 parsecs), which is equal to around 3264 lightyears. We are orbiting the black hole at 800,000km/h and it has a mass of about 4 million solar masses.

The object known as Sagittarius A* is thought to be the black hole and is found in the sky near the borders of both the Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations.

Answer: Hertzsprung-Russell

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram was created by Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell in the early 20th century and is a scatter chart of stars which plots luminosity against surface temperatures.

One can observe different types of star in different areas of the chart, with the main sequence roughly running from the top left (hottest, most luminous stars) to the bottom right (cooler, low luminosity stars), with giant stars above the main sequence and dwarfs below.

Answer: False

The mnemonic is actually to remember O, B, A, F, G, K, M, which is the Harvard Classification system for stars, determined by the colour (or temperature) of the star, with 'O' stars being the hottest (bluest) at over 33,000 Kelvin, and 'M' stars the coolest (reddest) at below 3,700 Kelvin.

Those stars at the left hand side of the scale are also the biggest and heaviest and have the highest luminosity, sometimes thousands of times brighter than the sun. Brighter stars also have a much shorter life than sun-like stars, often only a few millions of years as opposed to billions.

Answer: Edmond Halley computed the orbit and predicted the periodicity of the comet

Edmond Halley was born in London, England in 1656 and was active in many scientific fields including geophysics, mathematics and meteorology as well as atronomy. Halley was able to map the orbit of his namesake comet and predict it's return in 1758, by which time he was unfortunately dead. However it was given his name as he successfully predicted it's return.

Halley's comet was not discovered by Halley (or a pupil of his), it had in fact been observed for many thousands of years.

Answer: 4 hours

The orbit of Neptune around the sun is almost circular, but we still have to take an average distance of 4.5 billion kilometres between the two. Given that the speed of light is around 300 million metres per second, or 300,000 kilometres per second, we can see that the time it takes for sunlight to reach Neptune is around 4 hours, quite a wait in comparison to our 8 minutes!