The Basic Astronomy quiz

If you said "nine," you've revealed yourself as a quiz-taker Of A Certain Age. The onetime ninth planet, Pluto, was downgraded to dwarf-planet status in 2006, despite the protests of astronomy buffs who loved the little guy.

Of course, we're talking about the moon, Earth's only natural satellite. The planet has an ever-changing number of man-made satellites; they provide us with GPS systems, radio and more.

Seven of the eight planets, and the dwarf ninth, Pluto, are named for gods in the Roman pantheon, which are essentially Greek gods with new names. The exception? Planet Earth, our home. It's named after, uh, soil.

If you're looking up at the night sky and see what looks like a reddish star, but it isn't twinkling ... well, chances are you're looking at Mars. The reddish color of its soil is due to a high iron oxide content.

Orion and the Big Dipper are two of the most-recognized constellations. Others, like "the sextant," or "the serpent bearer," are based on objects or phenomena that no longer really exist, making these constellations even harder to recognize.

It's the largest planet in our solar system, great Jupiter. And what is the Red Spot? It's a high-pressure region, a storm that's been raging since the early 19th century at least. Imagine if there were poor Jovians living there: "Can we get a nice day, like just one or two? Just a short break?"

Hey, maybe we shouldn't rule out "sunrises"; we've never been actually been there! But people using a telescope for the first time invariably want to point it at Saturn, to see its marquee feature, its rings.

This answer should be obvious, but it tricks some people because the Earth is our home and vantage point. But, as Carl Sagan pointed out with his "Pale Blue Dot" metaphor, Earth is just another spot in the vastness of the universe.

The ancient Romans referred to this astronomical phenomenon as a "coma stellata," or "a star with long hair." Now we call it a comet, and some of the more famous ones are Halley's Comet and Comet Hale-Bopp.

How'd our galaxy get such a casual name? For crying out loud, "Milky Way" is also a candy bar frequently given out as minis at Halloween! Well, the name's a translation from the Latin "via lactea," because, seen from Earth, it resembles a cloudy, milky road of stars.

This is a common misconception, but the Big Dipper is only part of Ursa Major. After all, Ursa Major is "the Big Bear," and a bear and a dipper are pretty hard to mistake for each other, even in the loose framework of constellations.

A terrestrial planet is one whose composition is mostly rock and metal. Earth is one, though this definition might seem odd to us, as we mostly encounter the soil that is a fine layer atop earth's crust. The missing terrestrial planet above is Venus, meaning that the terrestrial planets are the inner four, nearest to the sun.

The first two planets beyond Mars are gas giants, meaning they are made primarily of hydrogen and helium. Uranus and Neptune are the ice giants, composed of frozen oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and sulfur.

The smooth, dark patches on the moon as referred to as "seas," or "maria" in Latin. One of the largest and best-known is the Mare Tranquilltatis, or "Sea of Tranquility." It is where the Apollo 11 lunar lander touched down.

A black hole occurs when a massive star collapses under its own weight. Not even light can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole—which is, of course, why we perceive them as black.

Mars is named for the god of war, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that its moons are "Phobos" and "Deimos," the Greek words for "fear" and "dread." They accompany war, after all.

Like comet hunting, exoplanet hunting is an ongoing pursuit of astronomers. It helps to have the resources of an observatory and a university behind you, however. To date, a little more than 4,000 exoplanets are known to exist.

Here's what confuses beginning astronomers, though. "Magnitude" is actually measured backward, to our way of thinking. That is, the brightest stars actually have a negative magnitude.

It sounds like it should be time, doesn't it? But a light-year is the distance that a particle of light can travel in one year. It's nearly 6 trillion miles, so if you're planning a vacation, maybe scale down your travel plans a little.

Ah, that's better. Well, a little. 93 million miles is the distance between the earth and the sun, and is commonly used to refer to distances within our solar system, within which light-years would be far too large a measure.

Betelgeuse is the left shoulder of Orion the Hunter (well, left as you're looking at it; it would be his right if he were an actual person). Fun fact: When you look at Betelgeuse, you are gazing at the single largest object it's possible to see unaided from Earth.

"Lunar" is the most common term. However, we also have words like "selenology" for the geology of the moon, and "pericynthion" for the point at which the moon is closest to the Earth. Where do these names come from? Luna, Selene and Cynthia are all moon-goddess names from mythology.

The asteroid belt is planetary material left over from the formation of the solar system. It might have come together to form an actual planet, but the contradictory pulls of Mars' gravity and Jupiter's didn't allow this, and so it has remained a group of orbiting asteroids, with one dwarf planet in the mix.

Such celestial objects are known by several romantic names: "rogue planets," "nomad planets" and "orphan planets." They orbit a galactic center directly, like stars and star systems do. Life on such planets seems less likely than on those with the sustaining resources of a star.

Meteors tend to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. Therefore, only the largest hit and make craters. The moon has no such atmosphere and is pocked with craters from the impacts.

The line between a huge exoplanet and a nonviable star is a fuzzy one; sometimes astronomers aren't sure what they're looking at. By "nonviable star," we mean one that doesn't have sufficient mass to create nuclear fusion reactions, as our sun does. This makes them little different from a huge gas-giant planet.

On "Cosmos," Neil DeGrasse Tyson called the Local Group a line in our "celestial address." It goes: Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Local Group, the Virgo Supercluster to the Observable Universe. Whew!

The sun's corona is the beautiful and somewhat irregular outer halo. Outside of photography, it's best seen during a total solar eclipse. (Even at totality, don't skip eye protection, please).

Ceres is a dwarf planet, the largest object in our solar system's asteroid belt. It's named for the Roman goddess of agriculture, so in Greece they call it "Demeter," their equivalent of the goddess Ceres.

Some people believe, erroneously, that because Saturn has rings, it does not have moons as well. Not true: Saturn has eight moons, more than any other planet in the Solar System.

Jupiter's moons are all named after the great Roman god's wives and mistresses. Oberon, in contrast, is a fairy-king figure from European literature (especially Shakespeare) and is a moon of Uranus. It's less poetically known as Uranus IV.

We hate to mark you down if you chose "God"—it's so poetic!—but the astronomically correct answer is "a massive black hole," which has been named "Sagittarius A." It emits detectable radio energy, though its actual existence can't be confirmed with current methods.

From Earth, there are fundamentally two kinds of eclipses: solar (when the moon blocks the sun) and lunar (when the Earth blocks the moon). Solar eclipses are amazing to watch because of a remarkable coincidence: The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, but 400 times closer to Earth as well, resulting in a perfect "cap."

To be fair, there is a broader definition of "event horizon" in the theory of general relativity, but we're not going to worry about that here. (Plus, we can't explain it because the definition goes over our heads). For our purposes, when you're approaching a black hole, the event horizon is the point at which suddenly no one's posting on your Facebook wall anymore.

Galileo believed that the sun was the center of what would become known as the solar system. At the time, most people believed in the geocentric system put forth by Ptolemy. Tycho Brahe, meanwhile, proposed a "mixed" system in which the sun and stars revolved around the Earth, but the known planets revolved around the sun—this explained (erroneously) confusing aspects of their movement in the sky.