Printable Fun Trivia - Cosmological Trivia Questions and Answers

Fun cosmological trivia questions, answers and facts.

Here are the printable fun trivia questions with the answers below them.

How long does it take light from the sun to reach the earth?
A:  Approximately 8 minutes and 18 seconds.

How far is the moon from the earth?
A: The actual Earth-Moon distance ranges from about 360,000 to 405, 000 kilometers, depending on the position in the Moon's orbit.  (223,694 to 251665 miles)

How much bigger is the sun than the earth?
A: The Earth is about 13 thousand kilometers (8000 miles) wide, whereas the Sun is roughly 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) across.  If the Sun were a hollow ball, you could fit about one million Earths inside of it! 

Which planet is closest to the sun?
A: Mercury.

What is the name of the most recently discovered planet?
A: Quaoar.

What is the sun made out of?
A: The Sun is, at present, about 70% hydrogen and 28% helium by mass everything else amounts to less than 2%

What powers the sun?
A: Fusion, the same as a hydrogen bomb. 

How old is the sun?
A: About 5 billion years.

How old is the earth?
A: The earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

How old is the universe?
A:  The Universe is at least 15 billion years old, but probably not more than 20 billion years old. 

Which planet spins the fastest?
A: Jupiter is the fastest spinning planet in our solar system rotating on average once in just under 10 hours.

fun printable cosmological trivia questions and answers

Which planet spins the slowest?
A: Venus is the slowest spinning planet in the solar system. It rotates only once every two hundred forty-three Earth days

How long is a Martian year?
A: The orbital period of Mars is 686.9726 days.

Does the sun rotate?
A: The movements of the sunspots indicate that the Sun rotates once every 27 days at the equator, but only once in 31 days at the poles. 

How big is the milky way?
A: The Milky Way is actually a giant, as its mass is probably between 750 billion and one trillion solar masses, and its diameter is about 100,000 light years.

What is the Milky Way?
A: The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy.

What star other than the sun is closest to the earth?
A: It is Proxima Centauri, the nearest member of the Alpha Centauri triple star system.