Q: On March 13, 1781, the astronomer and composer William Herschel spotted what he thought was a comet while looking at the constellation of Gemini. He made a note of it and reported the sighting to the Astronomer Royal. After several weeks of verification and consultation he determined it to be a new planet and called it ‘Georgian Star’. This was the first planet to be discovered since antiquity and made him famous. What planet was this which we now know by another name?
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A: Uranus
Q: On March 13, 1930, American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh was looking at the Kuiper belt while at the Lowell Observatory. He was using a 13-inch astrograph to take pictures of the sky to see if some object shifted position, indicating that it was a planet. He found one at a place predicted by Percival Lowell. The name for this new body was proposed by an 11-year-old English school girl and was adopted globally. What body is this which has been the centre of much debate?
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A: Pluto
Q: In 2015, NASA confirmed the presence of a strange planet 40 light years away from us. Tagged as GJ 1214b it’s a planet that doesn’t fit in to the traditional three types of planets, Rocky/Terrestrial (Earth & Mars), Gas Giant (Jupiter & Saturn) or Ice Giant (Uranus/Neptune). This is covered in thick wet fog, with a surface temperature of 450 degrees. With exotic materials such as hot ice by what name is this planet referred to which should remind you of a Kevin Costner movie?
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A: Waterworld
Q: Wasp-76 b is an exoplanet which is slightly smaller than Jupiter and is somewhere in the constellation Pisces 640 light-years away from Earth. The planet is extremely hot, with temperatures reaching 2,400 degrees Celsius during the day, which is always since it is tidally locked to its star. Such high temperatures lead to metals evaporating on the surface which leads to a fatal rainfall on the planet. What comes down as rain on this planet?
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A: Molten Iron
Q: A gas giant the size of Jupiter known as TrES-2b was discovered by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft 750 light years away. The planet reflects less than 1% of the sunlight falling on it, making it darker than any planet or moon seen up to now. Fittingly this dark planet is in the direction of a constellation which is named for the Latin word for ‘Dragon’. What is this constellation which should remind you of a character in Harry Potter?
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A: Draco
Q: This planet holds the record for the strongest winds in the solar system with wind speeds reaching 2,100 km/h. At 24,764 km wide it is the smallest gas giant, but is the densest of them all. It is theorised that there is a rocky core under all the gas where the gravity is the same as Earths. What planet is this which has these monster winds?
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A: Neptune
Q: 55 Cancri e is a planet located around 40 light years from Earth and has a mass eight times that of our planet. Unlike Earth’s surface which is covered by water and granite this is planet is covered by allotropes of the same element. One of the allotropes is very soft and seen in school stationery, while the other is hard and seen either in industries or jewelery. What are these two allotropes which cover this planet?
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A: Graphite and Diamond
Q: Kepler-16b, about 200 light years away from us is the very first discovery of a circumbinary planet. This would be an actual version of the planet ‘Tatooine’ from Star Wars, which because of its cicrumbinary nature leads to some really beautiful desktop wallpapers. Released to the public with the tagline ‘Where your shadow always has company’, what is special about the orbit of Kepler-16b?
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A: It orbits two stars, so has two suns in the sky.
Q: Today, the Earth’s axis is tilted 23.5 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the sun but it changes over time. In the last 40,000 years, the tilt of the axis varies between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees which leads to the seasons becoming exaggerated. There is one planet in our solar system which does not have any tilt, so consequently it has no seasons. Which planet is this which is also the only planet in our solar system that rotates clock-wise?
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A: Venus
Q: This is a classification given to any planet not in the solar system with mass higher than Earth’s, but substantially below the mass of Uranus and Neptune, which are 15 and 17 Earth masses respectively. The term refers only to the mass of the planet, and does not imply anything about the surface conditions or habitability. By what name are these extra-solar planets known which makes it sound like it’s from a DC movie?
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A: Super Earth
A molecular biologist from Madurai, our quizmaster enjoys trivia and music, and is working on a rock ballad called ‘Coffee is a Drink, Kaapi is an Emotion’. @bertyashley
