Makemake Trivia
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49 free Makemake trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Makemake trivia quiz covers the fourth-largest dwarf planet in the Solar System, the bright icy world in the Kuiper belt that most people cannot pronounce and fewer can place. The easy questions handle the basics: who found it, where it orbits, roughly how big it is compared with Pluto, and where its unusual name comes from. From there the quiz moves through the discovery scramble of 2005, the Easterbunny nickname, the minor-planet number, and the role Makemake played in getting Pluto demoted. The harder half is for space nerds: the 2011 stellar occultation, the mid-infrared excess, the moon nicknamed MK 2, the frozen methane and tholins on the surface, what the James Webb Space Telescope did and did not find, the proposed cryovolcanic hotspot, and the flyby trajectories that have been sketched for a future probe. If you have done our dwarf planet or solar system quizzes, this is the deep dive on one object. Every answer was checked against Makemake's encyclopaedia entry before publishing, and the numbers quoted are the ones astronomers currently use.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How does Makemake appear from Earth, even through a large telescope?
A star-like point of light
A star-like point of light is all any telescope shows, because Makemake is too small and distant to resolve. Astronomers measured its size by timing how long it hid a star in 2011.
Q 02In which region of the Solar System does Makemake orbit?
The Kuiper belt
The Kuiper belt is a doughnut-shaped zone of icy bodies beyond Neptune. They are leftovers from the Solar System's birth that never managed to gather into a full-sized planet.
Q 03Which of these is wider than Makemake?
The Moon
The Moon, Earth's own, is more than twice as wide as Makemake. In fact it is bigger than every known dwarf planet, though unlike them it circles a planet, not the Sun.
Q 04Makemake's discovery team, led by Mike Brown, was based at which California university?
Caltech
Caltech, in Pasadena, was home base. The survey telescope worked robotically through the night and sent its images there each morning for Brown's team to search.
Q 05What gave Makemake away among the background stars?
Motion
Motion: the telescope shot each patch of sky three times over a few hours, and computers flagged whatever had shifted against the fixed stars.
Q 06At which observatory was Makemake discovered?
Palomar
Palomar Observatory's Samuel Oschin telescope took the discovery images in 2005. A photograph from 1955 turned out to show Makemake too, caught 50 years before anyone noticed it.
Q 07What nickname did the discovery team give Makemake before it was formally named?
Easterbunny
Easterbunny, because the team found it just a few days after Easter. The joke name had to serve for three years, until the object finally got an official one.
Q 08Makemake is named after a creator god from the mythology of which people?
The Rapa Nui
The Rapa Nui saw Makemake as the creator of humanity. Naming rules favour creation-myth names for worlds on orbits like this one, which is why a creator god fitted.
Q 09Which of these comes closest to how astronomers pronounce Makemake?
MAH-keh MAH-keh
MAH-keh MAH-keh, in four syllables, is the form the IAU gave when it approved the name. Even its discoverer says it another way: Mike Brown wrote that he pronounces it 'Maki-maki'.
Q 10What is the smallest kind of instrument that can show Makemake at its brightest?
A high-end amateur telescope
A high-end amateur telescope is enough, because Makemake peaks near magnitude 17 each March or April, when Earth passes between it and the Sun.
Q 11Makemake's namesake created humanity and was the god of what?
Fertility
Fertility: Mike Brown said he was partial to fertility gods, as his wife was pregnant with their daughter when his team found Makemake. The name took until 2008 to win approval.
Q 12Which two other large trans-Neptunian objects had Brown's team found in the four months before Makemake?
Haumea and Eris
Haumea and Eris turned up over the winter of 2004–05, making three big finds in about three months with Makemake. Eris had sat unnoticed in 2003 images until a second look at old data.
Q 13The announcement of Makemake and its large neighbours helped push the IAU to do what in 2006?
Reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet
Q 21Why can't astronomers tell whether Makemake's day lasts 11.4 or 22.8 hours?
Its brightness barely varies
Its brightness barely varies, by only a few percent per turn, so observers cannot tell whether the faint flicker repeats once or twice in a rotation. That leaves the day at 11.4 hours or double that.
Q 22What gives Makemake its reddish-brown tint?
Tholins
Tholins are tarry organic compounds. They build up when sunlight and cosmic rays break apart Makemake's frozen methane and the fragments recombine into a dark, reddish residue.
Q 23Makemake's surface reflects sunlight about as well as which of these?
Snow
Reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet: finding worlds of similar size forced the IAU to define 'planet' at last. A planet must clear its orbital neighbourhood, and Pluto has not.
Q 14Roughly how long does Makemake take to orbit the Sun?
300 years
About 300 years, or 305 to 307 by current measurements. Makemake has covered less than a tenth of one lap since it was discovered in 2005.
Q 15At Makemake's average distance, about how long does sunlight take to arrive?
6 hours
About 6 hours: light that reaches Earth in about 8 minutes needs some 6 hours 20 minutes to get to Makemake, which orbits about 45 times farther out.
Q 16Astronomers class Makemake as a 'dynamically hot' object; what does 'hot' describe?
Its orbit
Its orbit: Makemake circles the Sun tilted 29 degrees from the plane of the planets, a sign that Neptune's gravity jostled it long ago. Its surface is anything but hot, at about −240 °C.
Q 17Makemake became the fourth recognised dwarf planet in 2008, after which three?
Ceres, Pluto and Eris
Ceres, Pluto and Eris came first. Eris was named for the Greek goddess of strife, a nod to the row its discovery caused over what counts as a planet.
Q 18Makemake belongs to which subcategory of dwarf planets, defined by orbiting beyond Neptune?
Plutoids
Plutoids was a label the IAU coined in June 2008, and a month later Makemake became the third of them. Ceres, in the asteroid belt, is the one dwarf planet left out.
Q 19Makemake is the fourth-largest known dwarf planet; which of these is one of the three larger ones?
Haumea
Haumea ranks third. It spins so fast, once in about four hours, that it has been stretched into a football shape, unlike nearly round Makemake.
Q 20What shape do measurements from the 2011 stellar occultation suggest for Makemake?
Slightly flattened at the poles
Slightly flattened at the poles: the timings fit a globe a touch wider at the equator than from pole to pole. A spinning world held together by its own gravity bulges like that.
Snow: Makemake bounces back roughly 80% of the sunlight that reaches it, because a coat of frozen methane keeps its surface bright.
Q 24Makemake's surface sits at about −240 °C; which of these is colder still?
Liquid helium
Liquid helium, which boils at −269 °C, is the only one colder. Liquid nitrogen poured onto Makemake would freeze solid, since nitrogen turns to ice at −210 °C.
Q 25Which two ices do infrared spectra fail to find on Makemake's surface?
Nitrogen and carbon monoxide
Nitrogen and carbon monoxide are both missing, though the same survey found signs of nitrogen ice on Eris. With nothing mixed in, Makemake's methane ice can knit into unusually large, clear grains.
Q 26Which space telescope's spectra, taken in 2023, showed the ices on Makemake's surface in fine detail?
James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope data held a second surprise: methane gas glowing faintly above the ice, the first gas ever detected around Makemake.
Q 27Which spacecraft measured how Makemake scatters sunlight at angles unreachable from Earth?
New Horizons
New Horizons, heading out of the Solar System, viewed Makemake from well off to one side of the Sun's direction. From Earth, such distant worlds are only ever seen almost fully lit.
Q 28What mostly makes up Makemake's interior?
Ice and rock
Ice and rock: at about 1.7 times the density of water, Makemake is too heavy to be ice alone. The rock has probably sunk into a core, leaving layers of water ice above it.
Q 29What does the unusually low share of deuterium in Makemake's methane suggest?
A warm interior with hydrothermal chemistry
A warm interior with hydrothermal chemistry may have cooked up the methane deep inside, then vented it to the surface. A rival study argues the methane is simply primordial.
Q 30Which space telescope first reported Makemake's excess mid-infrared emission in 2008?
Spitzer
Spitzer saw more 24-micron heat than so bright and frigid a surface should give off. The puzzle has outlived the telescope itself, which was retired in 2020 with the excess still unexplained.