Space it out

Been an earthbound misfit all your life? That's no excuse for not knowing your neighbourhood – especially when it's so incredibly fascinating. You might never do the Armageddon thing, (thank God for that!) but you can at least have a few brainy thrills.
Did Shepherd play ping pong on the moon or was it basketball? And whatever happened to Laika? How much do you really know about (life, love and) the universe? Take our quiz and find out.

1. How long does it take light to travel from one edge of the Milky Way to the other?
a) 100,000 years
b) Nah, more like 50, 000 years
c) It's light we're talking about here! I say 25,000 years
d) More like 25,000 seconds I'd say. How much is that in minutes?

2. What astronomer discovered that the universe is expanding?
a) Galileo Galilee
b) Albert Einstein
c) Percival Lowell
d) Edwin Hubble

3. Alan B. Shepard played what sport on the moon?
a) Gravity bounce
b) Golf
c) Basketball
d) Lunar chess

4. What event do astronomers believe began the universe?
a) The Horrendous Space Kablooie – also known as the Big Bang
b) Quasar
c) Supernova
d) Someone said "let there be light!"

5. All the planets spin the same way – except one; which planet spins 'backwards'?
a) Jupiter
b) Venus
c) Mars
d) Whichever one I'm on!

6. How do scientists measure the size of the universe?
a) With a super sized measuring tape
b) In light years
c) They don't because they can't. It's all guesswork
d) In kilometers

7. How fast does the sun travel around the centre of the galaxy?
a) 150 miles/second
b) 150 miles/minute
c) 150 miles/hour
d) Duh, stuff travels around the sun. Not the other way around.

8. How far have spacecraft from Earth travelled into space?
a) Well over 10 light-years
b) The moon – how far is that?
c) A bit less than one light-year
d) Somewhat less than one light-day

9. How old is the earth?
a) Dunno, they lost the birth certificate
b) Around 7,000,000,000 years
c) Around 5,000,000,000 years
d) Go ask Eve…go on then!

10. A brown dwarf:
a) Is a small star that is somewhat cooler than a red dwarf
b) Is a very large planet
c) Is similar to each of the above.
d) Is a planet that forgot to wear sunscreen

11. When space is warped,
a) It's indulging in all sorts of perverse things
b) It can be travelled through in a shorter amount of time (relative to the un-warped portion.)
c) It has a pretty red bow on
d) It's in a science fiction classic

12. On which planet is a day longer than a year?
a) Planet EHH on orbit one (Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel)
b) Venus again
c) Not-a-planet-anymore-Pluto
d) Mercury

13. Who among the following was the first visitor to space?
a) Mahinda X (abducted by aliens)
b) Yuri Gagarin
c) Alan B. Shepard
d) Laika the dog

14. What makes the planet Mars look like it is red?
a) Fire from volcanoes
b) The iron in the soil
c) Profound cosmic sized embarrassment
d) The Martians have a thing for red, you know

15. Which planet has the most moons?
a) Saturn
b) Jupiter
c) Uranus
d) It depends…which one wears pants?

Scoring Table:
1. a) The Milky Way, only one of countless other galaxies is home to 200 to 400 billion stars, and so calling it 'big' is something of an understatement. The main disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is about 80,000 to 100,000 light years in diameter and about 250-300 thousand light years in circumference.

2. d) Edwin Hubble did nothing less than invent the idea of the universe, and then followed that discovery up with the first evidence in support of the Big Bang theory. Not only did he discover galaxies outside the Milky Way, he proved that this galaxy-studded cosmos is expanding – inflating majestically like an unimaginably gigantic balloon.

3. b) Alan Shepard became the first man to hit a golf ball on the Moon, using a ball and golf club head he had smuggled on board inside his space suit. He hit two balls just before lift-off, and drove them, as he put it, "miles and miles and miles."

4. a) According to the Big Bang theory, the universe was created sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago from a cosmic explosion that hurled matter in all directions. It explains why distant galaxies are travelling away from us at great speeds. The theory also predicts the existence of cosmic background radiation (the glow left over from the explosion itself).

5. b) Oddly, Venus rotates from east to west. To an observer on Venus, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east.
6. b) The universe is so huge that scientists measure its size in billions of light years – the distance light travels in a whole year. A light year may sound like a measurement of time – instead it's one of distance. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometres per second). Therefore, a light second is 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometres) and a light year (hold your breath) equals 9,460,800,000,000 kilometres!

7. a) And the Sun is not the only celestial object speeding. In fact recent estimates say that the Milky Way is moving at 600 km per second, which means we are travelling 51.84 million km per day, or more than 18.9 billion km per year – all without feeling a thing. It’s wonder that the great big Traffic Cop in the sky hasn't booked the lot of us.

8. d) The planetary exploration missions Pioneer and Voyager have barely travelled beyond our Solar System – and these are the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth. After nearly 40 years in space, Voyager 1 is now the most distant man-made object in the universe, nearly 11 billion miles from Earth.

9. c) As usual, when the hospital has lost the records, you just have to rely on guesswork. The oldest rocks we have found on earth are about 3.5 billion years old but calculations place the Sun at about 5 billion years old. Since scientists think that the sun and the earth (along with the rest of the solar system) were created about the same time – they've settled on the big 5.

10. c) It's a little bit of both. Size wise, brown dwarfs fall between the lowest mass stars and large gas-giant planets. A brown dwarf isn't a star 'cause it doesn't have the oomph to transform hydrogen into helium.

11. b) Anything that has mass will warp space (actually, compress is probably a better word than warp, but let's stick with the language of Star Trek). And the bigger the mass, the greater its warping effects. Extremely massive objects, like stars, are good at warping space. Black holes, which are the super-massive remnants of large, burned-out stars, are extremely good at warping space.

12. b) Yes, Venus is weird. And in more ways than one. Venus spins very slowly – only once every 243 Earth days. It is the slowest spinning planet in the solar system. As a matter of fact, a day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus! A year (the time it takes for it to orbit the sun) amounts to 225 Earth days.

13. c) Laika is the first living creature to have orbited space. A good-natured mongrel from the streets of Moscow, Laika was probably around three years old when she was launched from Earth in Sputnik-2 on November 3, 1957. Unfortunately, she died a few hours after launch from stress and overheating.

14. b) Known as the red planet for good reason, Mars is also famous as the home of so far elusive martians. Early reports of straight lines crisscrossing the surface, thought to be "irrigation canals", were taken as proof that intelligent life existed on the planet. In 1938, a radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, had enough people believing in the tale of invading Martians to cause a near panic. Luckily for us, the bacteria get them every time.

15. b) There are 240 known moons within the Solar system, including 162 orbiting the planets, 4 orbiting dwarf planets, and dozens more orbiting small solar system bodies. Jupiter, however, is king with a total number of known moons standing at 63.