Shoot the Moon! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope

Uranus is the seventh planet in our Solar System and has 27 moons which are all named after characters from the works of Shakespeare and Pope. The first two moons were discovered by William Herschel in 1787. The largest five moons of Uranus would be considered dwarf planets if they orbited the sun instead of Uranus.

Answer: Saturn

Discovered in 1655 by Christiaan Huygens, Titan is the largest moon orbiting the planet Saturn and the second largest moon in the solar system. It is larger than the planet Mercury. It has a nitrogen-rich atmosphere and is thought to be composed of water ice and rocky materials. It also has liquid hydrocarbon lakes in the polar regions.

Answer: False

This statement is false, as neither Mercury nor Venus have a moon. This is not thought to be unusual, and it is believed that a significant number of planets in other solar systems do not have moons either.

Answer: Triton

The largest moon of Neptune is called Triton. It was discovered in October 1946 by British astronomer William Lassell. Its name is derived from a Greek sea god called Triton, the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite. Triton is a merman (head of a man, body of a fish).

He is usually pictured with a trident and conch shell. Triton moves in the opposite direction compared to Neptune itself (this is known as retrograde orbit). It always has one side facing Neptune, however, with either one of the polar regions facing the sun.

The moon is said to have originated in the Kuiper belt, a region of our Solar System beyond the currently known planets. This is usually the case for moons that are in retrograde orbit.

Answer: Pluto

Charon is the largest of the five moons orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto. It is approximately half the size of Pluto itself and is thought to have formed from debris resulting from an early collision between Pluto and an unknown object. Due to its distance from Earth very little is known about Charon. Because its orbit around Pluto takes 6.4 Earth days and one Pluto rotation (a Pluto day) also takes 6.4 days, the same side of Charon is always facing the planet.

This is known as tidal locking.

Answer: True

Ganymede, which orbits the giant planet of Jupiter is the largest moon in our Solar System. With a diameter of 3,273 miles (5,268 km) it is larger than the planet Mercury and has the highest mass of any of the moons. Discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610, Ganymede has a thin oxygen atmosphere and an underground ocean, as well as a magnetosphere.

Answer: Mimas

In Greek mythology Uranus was castrated by his son Cronus. The Giant (also called Gigantes) children of Gaia, the goddess of the earth, were conceived from the blood of Uranus. They all had serpent-like legs. One of these sons was Mimas. The moon Mimas was discovered by William Herschel in September 1789.

The large crater found on Mimas was named after him. This crater is so large in size, that the object making it must have nearly broken Mimas fully apart. The name Mimas was reportedly suggested by Herschel's son John.

The names of the moons of Saturn are largely derived from the Titans, a race of deities in Greek mythology. Saturn was the leader of the Titans.

Answer: Io

The primary reason that Io is so geologically active is because of the gravitational forces it is subject to, caught between Jupiter and the other three Galilean moons (Europa, Ganymede and Callisto). While it is the innermost of the Galilean moons (discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610), it is in fact the fifth-closest moon to Jupiter. With a diameter of 2,263 miles, Io is Jupiter's third largest moon, and is also smaller than Saturn's Titan, making it the fourth largest moon in our Solar System.

It orbits the planet once every 42.5 hours, two times as fast as Europa and four times as fast as Ganymede.

Answer: Phobos and Deimos

In Greek mythology, Phobos (panic/fear) and Deimos (terror/dread) accompanied their father Ares when he went to war. As moons of Mars, they were discovered in 1877 by US astronomer Asaph Hall (1829-1907), who also determined the mass of Mars and the rotation of Saturn among his accomplishments.

The irregularly-shaped moons are both believed to have been asteroids that were captured by Mars' gravity field. Phobos, the inner moon, has a diameter of 13.8 miles, and orbits Mars from west to east in a speedy 11 hours. Deimos, with a diameter of 7.8 miles, moves from east to west and takes a more sedate 30-hour trip around the planet. Like Earth's moon, both Phobos and Deimos are tidally locked, keeping one face towards the planet.

Answer: True

This is true, and in a convoluted way makes Dr. Shoemaker the first man to visit a moon and stay there. Our moon is the fifth largest moon to be found in our Solar System. Our moon has large impact craters and is the brightest object in our sky after the sun.

Although it has not been proven, many astronomers believe that our moon was created from debris left over from a large impact between the Earth and an unknown body the size of the planet Mars.