Shakespearean Moons Trivia Quiz

Answer: Titania

Sir William Herschel first identified the two largest moons of Uranus, Titania and Oberon, on 11 January 1787. The pair were named after the warring King and Queen of the Fairies in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Titania (the moon) is composed of rock and ice and measures approximately 1,600 km (980 miles) in diameter - for comparison, the diameter of Earth's moon is approximately 3,500 km (2,200 miles).

Titania's surface was partially mapped by the spacecraft Voyager 2 in 1986 and found to be made up of a series of craters, canyons and faults. These topographical features were then also given names from characters or places featured in the plays of Shakespeare, such as the Gertrude crater which is named after Hamlet's mother.

The incorrect options are all characters from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream': Hippolyta is the Queen of the Amazons; and Hermia and Helena are young women caught up in Oberon's complicated schemes.

Answer: Miranda

The exact height of the tallest cliff in the solar system is hard to measure given that it is situated on one of the moons of Uranus, a very long way away! Different sources provide estimates ranging from 5 km (3 miles) to 20 km (12 miles). Regardless of the exact figure, it is clearly very tall - Mount Thor, which has one of the highest vertical drops on Earth, is a mere 1.4 km (0.9 miles) high. Verona Rupes is named after the city in northern Italy that was the setting for three Shakespeare plays ('Romeo and Juliet', 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona' and 'The Taming of the Shrew') - although oddly enough it doesn't feature anywhere in the 'The Tempest'. A rupes is the name given to escarpments found on various bodies of the solar system.

Miranda was discovered in 1948 by the Dutch-American astronomer, Gerard Kuiper, whose name has famously been given to the Kuiper Belt - the area of space beyond the eight planets filled with numerous small bodies and dwarf planets, such as Pluto.

Julia, Lucetta and Silvia are all female characters from 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona'.

Answer: Puck

Robin Goodfellow, better known as Puck, is a mischievous elf who was played by a young Mickey Rooney in the 1935 film adaptation of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Puck the moon is located between the rings of Uranus and the larger moon Miranda, at a distance of about 86,000 km (53,000 miles) from the planet.

Put simply, the term prograde orbit means that an object is rotating in the same direction as the body it is orbiting. Objects with an orbital inclination (the angle between the object's orbit and the equatorial plane of the orbited body) of between 0 and 90 degrees, are prograde by definition. Puck has an orbital inclination of just 0.3 degrees - hence the term 'low-inclination orbit'.

The term puck can also refer to the rubber disc used in ice hockey. Balls are used in a wide variety of sports, shuttlecocks are found in the game of badminton, and quaffles appear in the fictional sport, Quidditch, created by J.K. Rowling.

Answer: Caliban and Sycorax

Caliban and Sycorax are the two largest irregular moons of Uranus. They are both located a long way from the planet and have retrograde orbits (i.e. they rotate in the opposite direction to the planet).

Sycorax's orbit is around 12.2 million km (7.5 million miles) from Uranus, while Caliban is (slightly) closer at 7.2 million km (4.5 million miles). The two moons were discovered on the same day by a group of astronomers using the Hale telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.

Very little is known about Caliban and Sycorax given their relatively recent discovery and enormous distance from Earth. It seems unlikely however that they share any characteristics with the Shakespearean Caliban and Sycorax. Caliban is a deformed half-human described as "not honour'd with human shape" and his mother, Sycorax, is an evil witch who died prior to the events depicted in the play. On second thoughts though, Caliban the moon is also clearly "not honour'd with human shape" so maybe there was some sense behind the name after all!

The incorrect options are all mothers and sons from Shakespeare plays who have not given their names to moons of Uranus. Hermione and Mamillius are from 'The Winter's Tale', Martius and Virgilia are from 'Coriolanus' and Antipholus and Emilia are from 'The Comedy of Errors'.

Answer: The Portia Group

The Portia Group consists of Portia (unsurprisingly), Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Rosalind, Cupid, Perdita and Belinda. All of these, with the exception of Belinda, are named after Shakespearean characters. Belinda is one of the three moons of Uranus (along with Ariel and Umbriel) named after characters from Alexander Pope's poem 'The Rape of the Lock'.

The majority of the moons of the Portia Group were discovered as a result of images taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986. Perdita was also pictured in these images but was not noticed until 1999 when Erich Karkoschka of the University of Arizona spotted it in the data. The name 'Perdita' seems particularly apt for this moon as the Shakespearean character was the long lost daughter of King Leontes and Queen Hermione in 'The Winter's Tale'. The smallest moon of the Portia Group, Cupid, was discovered in 2003 thanks to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Nerissa and Jessica are both characters from 'The Merchant of Venice'. Katherina is the titular 'shrew' in 'The Taming of the Shrew'.

Answer: Ophelia

Shepherd moons are natural satellites located near the edge of planetary rings, whose gravity helps to maintain the structure of the ring by keeping the edge clear and well-defined. Material floating about near the edge of the ring is deflected back in, shot out into space or pulled onto the moon's surface. The relationship between shepherd moons and their ring systems is highly complex and difficult to define, but another known shepherd moon in the solar system is Galatea which shepherds one of Saturn's outer rings, known as the Adams Ring.

In our solar system, Saturn is the planet that is famous for its dramatic ring system. Uranus's rings are slightly less impressive, being dark bands of macroscopic particles and dust that encircle the planet. The Epsilon ring is the brightest, accounting for approximately two thirds of the light reflected by Uranus's ring system.

The Shakespearean Ophelia is the daughter of Polonius and is Hamlet's love interest. She met an unfortunate end when she fell out of a willow tree, ended up in a stream and drowned. Octavia is the wife of Mark Antony (from 'Antony and Cleopatra'); Olivia is a countess from 'Twelfth Night', and Mistress Overdone is from 'Measure for Measure'.

Answer: Cordelia

Cordelia is a small inner moon, measuring only approximately 40 km (25 miles) in diameter. Its orbit is very close to that of its planet - for comparison purposes, the Earth's moon is located approximately 380,000 km (240,000 miles) from the Earth.

Cordelia was discovered from pictures taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986. It is also acts as the inner shepherd moon for Uranus's epsilon ring - partnering Ophelia, the outer shepherd moon.

Goneril and Regan both appear in 'King Lear' and are Cordelia's elder sisters. Blanche (of Castile) was the niece of King John of England and appears as a character in Shakespeare's history play, 'King John'.

Answer: Queen Mab

Mab was discovered in 2003 by the scientists Mark R. Showalter and Jack J. Lissauer. It is a very small and dark moon and as such there has been considerable difficulty in estimating its actual size, as the calculations depend on an accurate assessment of its brightness. Mab's orbit is just within that of the much larger moon, Miranda - making it one of the most distant inner moons from the surface of the planet.

Mab's orbit coincides with Uranus's mu ring, which was discovered in 2006. The mu ring is part of the outer ring system and is blue in colour, indicating that it is made up of very small dusty particles that may potentially be formed from water ice. Mab is believed to be the source of the material distributed through the mu ring.

Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Mustardseed are all fairies that feature in Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.

Answer: Margaret

The 'eccentricity' of a celestial body's orbit is a measurement of how far it deviates from a perfect circle. A value of 0 represents the perfect circular orbit, values between 0 and 1 indicate elliptical orbits, a value of 1 means a parabola and values greater than 1 indicate a hyperbola. Eccentricity is not a constant value and tends to change slightly over long periods of time, probably due to gravitational effects from other nearby objects. Margaret's eccentricity is estimated at approximately 0.66 on average. It was first discovered in 2003.

Margaret is only a minor character in 'Much Ado About Nothing' - it therefore seems fitting that Margaret the moon is very small (it has an approximate diameter of 20 km or 12 miles). The other famous Margarets mentioned are Margaret Thatcher, the first female British Prime Minister (1979-1990), Margaret Atwood, author of 'The Blind Assassin' which won the Booker Prize in 2000, and Margaret of Anjou who also appears as a character in four Shakespeare plays (namely 'Henry VI, Part 1', 'Henry VI, Part 2', 'Henry VI, Part 3' and 'Richard III').

Answer: Trinculo

These moons are known as 'irregular moons' because of their distant, generally eccentric and retrograde orbits. Uranus's irregular moons can be split into two broad groups - inner and outer. Trinculo is one of the inner irregular moons along with Caliban, Francisco and Stephano. The outer group includes moons such as Sycorax and Prospero.

Trinculo is considered to have a moderately eccentric orbit (approximately 0.2 on the scale) which might explain why the name of a fictitious alcoholic jester was applied to it! 'The Tempest' has been used to name nine of Uranus's moons - the most of any Shakespeare play. The others are Miranda, Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Francisco and Ferdinand. All of them, with the exception of Miranda, are classed as irregular moons.

Touchstone is a jester in 'As You Like It', Feste is a fool in 'Twelfth Night' and Launce is a clownish character in 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona'.