Name: ___________________________________________________ Period: ________ Date: _______________

Astronomy Pre-Test
Directions: This pre-test is designed to test your prior understanding. Answer the questions to the best of your
knowledge. Wrong answers won’t count against you, so if you don’t know, give it your best guess.

1) Why is a year a year?

2) Why is a day a day?

3) Why is a month about 30 days?

4) What causes the Earth’s seasons?

5) What season is it right now in South America?

6) Is the solar system shaped more like a basketball or a Frisbee?

7) TRUE / FALSE: Astronauts on the International Space Station float because there is no gravity in space.

8) How many official planets are there in our solar system?

9) What galaxy do we live in?

10) TRUE / FALSE: The Sun is just an ordinary star.

11) How old is the Earth?

12) How old is the universe?

13) TRUE / FALSE: Most other stars we see are actually solar systems with planets of their own.

14) Is the universe getting bigger, smaller, or is it staying the same size?

15) What will happen to our Sun in another five billion years?

16) Why can’t we see what other stars and/or galaxies actually look like right now?

17) What is a black hole?

18) TRUE / FALSE: We can tell what distant stars are made of.

19) Besides making objects look larger, what else do telescopes allow us to do?
20) Are the stars of a constellation near each other in space?

21) What’s special about the North Star?

22) Which planets are made of gases rather than rock?

23) TRUE / FALSE: Planets can have multiple moons.

24) Which planet is most similar to the Earth in terms of size?

25) What icy objects orbit the Sun in highly elliptical orbits?

26) What is a shooting star?

27) TRUE / FALSE: Humans have never gone farther away than the Moon.

28) What is the likely final outcome of a supermassive star?

29) List the colors of the spectrum:

30) What color are the coolest stars?

31) What other types of radiation exist, besides visible light?

32) TRUE / FALSE: Christopher Columbus proved that the Earth is round, not flat.

33) What object is responsible for the tides?

34) Where is the Hubble telescope?

35) What causes a solar eclipse?

36) What is a dwarf planet?

37) Are most stars larger or smaller than our Sun?

38) Why do stars shine?

39) TRUE / FALSE: The Big Dipper is visible from Australia.

40) What is this object? 