How it works
These astronomy questions and answers go past the planets: how stars live and die, what galaxies and the Big Bang tell us, and how astronomers measure distances. Every answer comes with the reason.
Read the full guide
Three sets
Stars runs from the main sequence to red giants, white dwarfs, supernovae, neutron stars and black holes. Galaxies and the universe covers Andromeda, redshift, dark matter and the Big Bang. The last set asks about light-years, parsecs, telescopes, Kepler and Galileo.
Harder than the kids' quiz
This bank is written for high school and adult learners. For younger players, space trivia for kids asks about the planets, the Moon and astronauts, and no question appears in both. For a quiz night, print the question sheet and the answer key and read one set per round.
- A light-year is a distance, not a time: how far light goes in a year.
- On the magnitude scale smaller numbers are brighter, so Sirius at −1.46 outshines a magnitude 1 star.
Questions and answers
What are some hard astronomy questions?
Try: which end of the O, B, A, F, G, K, M sequence is hottest? How many light-years make a parsec? What does Kepler's second law say? The answers, with reasons, are in the quiz.
How old is the universe?
About 13.8 billion years, according to current Big Bang models fitted to data from the Planck spacecraft.
Where do the answers come from?
Each answer was checked against the Wikipedia article named under it in September 2026. The quiz leaves out counts that keep changing, such as the number of known exoplanets.