Quick answer: Space trivia questions with answers, sixty of them, in six rounds of ten: the solar system, the Sun and Moon, stars and galaxies, space exploration, living in space and a hard round. Every answer comes with one extra fact for the host to read out.
Space is the round where the room leans in. Everyone has looked up at night and wondered, and most people know more than they think: the Red Planet, the first man on the Moon, the rings of Saturn. The fun is in the second half of each answer, where the thing everyone knows turns out to be slightly wrong.
These sixty run from easy to hard inside each round. We left out anything that changes every few months, like moon counts and launch records, so the sheet will still be right next year.
How to use these: one space round fits any quiz night, and it works well with families because children often beat the adults. If you only need ten questions, take two from each of the first five rounds. Read each question twice and mark the answers after the round.
Round one: the solar system
1. Which planet is closest to the Sun?
Mercury. It is not the hottest, though.
2. Which planet is the hottest, and why?
Venus, at around 465 degrees Celsius. Its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere traps heat, so it is hotter than Mercury despite being almost twice as far from the Sun.
3. Why is Mars red?
Rust. Its dust is rich in iron oxide.
4. Which is the largest planet?
Jupiter. It has more than twice the mass of all the other planets put together.
5. Is Saturn the only planet with rings?
No. Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune have rings too. Saturn's are simply the only ones bright enough to see easily.
6. Which planet spins on its side?
Uranus, tilted about 98 degrees, probably after a giant collision long ago.
7. In which year was Pluto reclassified as a dwarf planet?
2006, by the International Astronomical Union.
8. On which planet is a day longer than a year?
Venus. It takes about 243 Earth days to spin once and only about 225 to go around the Sun.
9. What is the Great Red Spot?
A storm on Jupiter wider than the Earth, which has been watched continuously for nearly two hundred years.
10. Where is the tallest volcano in the solar system?
On Mars. Olympus Mons is about 22 kilometres high, roughly two and a half times the height of Everest.
Round two: the Sun, the Moon and the Earth
11. How long does sunlight take to reach the Earth?
About eight minutes and twenty seconds. You are always seeing the Sun as it was a few minutes ago.
12. What is the Sun mostly made of?
Hydrogen, about three quarters, and nearly all the rest is helium.
13. Why do we always see the same side of the Moon?
Tidal locking. The Moon turns exactly once for every orbit, so the same face always points at us.
14. Is the far side of the Moon always dark?
No. It gets just as much sunlight as the near side. "Dark" only ever meant unseen.
15. What causes the seasons?
The tilt of the Earth's axis, about 23.4 degrees. Not the distance from the Sun: the Earth is actually closest to the Sun in early January.
16. What mainly causes the tides?
The pull of the Moon's gravity, with a smaller push and pull from the Sun.
17. How many people have walked on the Moon?
Twelve, all of them between 1969 and 1972.
18. What does a light-year measure?
Distance, not time. It is how far light travels in a year, about 9.46 trillion kilometres.
19. Is the Moon getting closer to the Earth or moving away?
Moving away, by about 3.8 centimetres a year, roughly as fast as your fingernails grow.
20. What creates the northern lights?
Charged particles from the Sun, steered by the Earth's magnetic field, colliding with gases high in the atmosphere.
Round three: stars, galaxies and the universe
21. What is the name of our galaxy?
The Milky Way.
22. Which star is closest to Earth after the Sun?
Proxima Centauri, about 4.24 light-years away.
23. What is a black hole?
A region where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.
24. In which year was the first image of a black hole published?
2019, by the Event Horizon Telescope team. It shows the black hole at the centre of the galaxy M87.
25. What is the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way?
Andromeda, about 2.5 million light-years away. The two may merge in around five billion years.
26. How old is the universe?
About 13.8 billion years.
27. Which colour are the hottest stars?
Blue. Red stars are the cooler ones, which is the opposite of the taps in most bathrooms.
28. What is a supernova?
The explosion of a star, most famously a massive one at the end of its life. For a few weeks it can outshine its whole galaxy.
29. Which is the brightest star in the night sky?
Sirius, the Dog Star.
30. Which constellation contains the Big Dipper?
Ursa Major, the Great Bear. The Big Dipper, or the Plough in Britain, is only part of it.
Round four: exploring space
31. What was the first artificial satellite?
Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union in October 1957. It was about the size of a beach ball.
32. Who was the first person to walk on the Moon?
Neil Armstrong, in July 1969. Buzz Aldrin followed him about twenty minutes later.
33. Who was the first woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963.
34. Which space telescope was launched in 1990?
Hubble. Its first images were blurred by a mirror ground slightly wrong, and astronauts fixed it in 1993.
35. Which space telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021?
The James Webb Space Telescope.
36. What is the most distant human-made object?
Voyager 1, launched in 1977 and in interstellar space since 2012.
37. Who was the first animal to orbit the Earth?
Laika, a stray dog from Moscow, on Sputnik 2 in 1957. She did not survive the flight.
38. Which Mars rover landed in 2021 carrying a small helicopter?
Perseverance. The helicopter, Ingenuity, made the first powered flight on another planet.
39. Which crew radioed "Houston, we've had a problem"?
Apollo 13, in 1970. The film turned it into "we have a problem".
40. Since when has the International Space Station had people on board without a break?
November 2000.
Round five: living in space
41. Do astronauts get taller in space?
Yes, by up to about five centimetres, because the spine stretches without gravity. They shrink back on Earth.
42. Why would you not hear an explosion in space?
There is no air to carry the sound.
43. About how many sunrises does the ISS crew see in a day?
Sixteen. The station circles the Earth roughly every ninety minutes.
44. What does a candle flame look like in microgravity?
A small blue ball. Without gravity, hot air does not rise, so the flame cannot stretch upwards.
45. Why do astronauts eat tortillas instead of bread?
Bread makes crumbs, and crumbs float into eyes and equipment.
46. Can you cry in space?
You can, but the tears do not fall. They gather into a ball of water on your eye.
47. How fast does the International Space Station travel?
About 28,000 kilometres an hour.
48. Why are spacesuits white?
White reflects the heat of the Sun.
49. What do astronauts say space smells like after a spacewalk?
Burnt metal or seared steak, a smell they notice on their suits once they are back inside.
50. What is the overview effect?
The shift in perspective many astronauts describe after seeing the whole Earth from space, with no borders visible. The writer Frank White named it in 1987.
Round six: the hard round
51. Which planet's moon Titan has lakes of liquid methane?
Saturn's.
52. Which moon of Jupiter is thought to hide a salty ocean under its ice?
Europa, one of the best places to look for life beyond Earth.
53. What is the Kuiper Belt?
A ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune. Pluto lives there.
54. At what height does space officially begin, by the most common definition?
100 kilometres, the Kármán line.
55. Who first proposed that the universe began from a single point, the idea later called the Big Bang?
Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and physicist, in the late 1920s. The name Big Bang came from Fred Hoyle, who did not believe it.
56. About how many Earths would fit inside the Sun?
About 1.3 million.
57. How heavy would a teaspoon of neutron star be?
Around a billion tonnes.
58. Which comet returns about every 76 years and is next due in 2061?
Halley's Comet.
59. Which was the first planet discovered with a telescope?
Uranus, found by William Herschel in 1781. He wanted to name it after King George III.
60. Which planet would float in a bathtub big enough to hold it?
Saturn. On average it is less dense than water.
How to run a space round
Save the myths for the end. The questions that land hardest are the ones people answer instantly and wrongly: the far side of the Moon is not dark, Mercury is not the hottest planet, and the Earth is closest to the Sun in January. Read those answers slowly.
Use a number as a tie-breaker. How many minutes does sunlight take to reach Earth? Closest team wins. The answer is a little over eight.
If the space round goes well, we have a whole cluster on the sky: solar eclipse trivia questions, why solar eclipses happen, and more science in science trivia questions and 47 mind-blowing science facts.
More quiz questions
For more rounds to read aloud, trivia questions by category has sixty questions across ten subjects, and history trivia questions has a hundred more. If you would rather play than host, try the 500 pub quiz questions online, or tap through the random fact generator for one fact at a time.
And if a question here sent you wondering, that is the point. NerdSip turns any subject, from black holes to how the Moon was made, into five-minute courses with a quick question at the end of each lesson, so the answer is still there next week.
Sources and Further Reading
Every answer was checked against the space agencies and observatories that did the work. These are the best places to read further.
- NASA Science: Our Solar System
- NASA Science: Venus Facts
- NASA Science: Moon Facts
- NASA Science: Pluto
- ESA/Hubble: The History of Hubble
- Event Horizon Telescope: Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole (2019)
- NASA Science: The Voyager Missions
- NASA: International Space Station
Frequently Asked Questions
What are good space trivia questions for adults?
The ones with a twist. Venus, not Mercury, is the hottest planet because its thick atmosphere traps heat. The far side of the Moon is not dark; it gets as much sunlight as the side we see. And the Earth is closest to the Sun in early January, so the seasons come from the tilt of the Earth, not its distance.
What are easy space trivia questions for kids?
Which planet is the red one (Mars, because of rusty dust), which is the biggest (Jupiter), who first walked on the Moon (Neil Armstrong, in 1969) and what our galaxy is called (the Milky Way).
How many people have walked on the Moon?
Twelve, all American and all between 1969 and 1972, on six Apollo missions.
Why is Venus hotter than Mercury?
Venus has a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide that traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect, keeping its surface around 465 degrees Celsius day and night. Mercury has almost no atmosphere, so its heat escapes and its night side freezes.
How many questions should a space round have?
Ten is the standard round. Mix easy questions about planets with a few myth-busting ones, and keep a number question back as a tie-breaker.
Every NerdSip course clears a four-layer fact-checking pipeline before it reaches the app: grounded in live sources, scored nightly, gated on failure, and reviewable by a person at one tap. Articles on this blog are drafted with AI assistance, then researched, verified, and edited by our team.
Editorial responsibility: ai51 UG (haftungsbeschränkt). Responsible editor named in the imprint.
📚 Keep Learning
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