Sirius Trivia
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48 free Sirius trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Sirius trivia quiz covers the brightest star in the night sky, from its place in Canis Major to the white dwarf that circles it every fifty years. The easy questions are ones any stargazer can answer: the constellation, the nickname, roughly how far away it is, what kind of star its faint companion is and which season's dog days it once announced. The harder end is for astronomy and history readers: what the Greek name means, the Egyptian goddess who was Sirius, why the Nile flood was tied to its rising, the astronomer who predicted the unseen companion in 1844 and the telescope-maker who spotted it in 1862, the year Huggins first measured a star's velocity, why some ancient writers called Sirius red, the Polynesian bird constellation it formed, the year it will become the southern pole star, the Dogon controversy, and the satellite radio company named after it. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the star, its constellation and its history before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Stars, Constellations and Astronomy quizzes next.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which constellation is Sirius the brightest star?
Canis Major
Canis Major: it trails at the heels of Orion the hunter, and Greek stargazers often pictured it chasing Lepus, the hare, across the sky.
Q 02Which is the only star visible to the naked eye at night that lies closer to us than Sirius?
Alpha Centauri
Alpha Centauri: it sits so far south that it never rises over Europe or most of North America, which makes Sirius the nearest star that skywatchers there can see without a telescope.
Q 03What is the Greek word behind the name Sirius usually said to mean?
Glowing or scorching
Glowing or scorching is the usual reading of the Greek Seirios, but some scholars suspect the Greeks borrowed the star's name from an older language.
Q 04Which star is the second-brightest in the night sky, roughly half as bright as Sirius?
Canopus
Canopus pours out hundreds of times more light than Sirius and only looks fainter because it lies roughly 310 light-years away, dozens of times farther off.
Q 05Roughly how far from Earth is the Sirius system?
About 8.6 light-years
About 8.6 light-years: only a handful of stars lie closer to the Sun, and that nearness, more than raw power, is the main reason Sirius outshines every other star at night.
Q 06What kind of object is Sirius B?
A white dwarf
A white dwarf: it is the collapsed core of a star that used up its nuclear fuel, so with nothing left to burn it can only cool and fade.
Q 07How long do Sirius A and B take to orbit each other?
About half a century
About half a century: over each orbit the hidden partner tugs Sirius A into a slightly wavy path across the sky, which gave it away before any telescope could show it.
Q 08Which astronomer deduced in 1844 that Sirius had an unseen companion?
Friedrich Bessel
Friedrich Bessel: he never saw his prediction confirmed, dying in 1846, sixteen years before a telescope finally revealed the faint companion.
Q 09Who first observed Sirius B, in January 1862, while testing a new telescope lens?
Alvan Graham Clark
Alvan Graham Clark: the chance sighting during a routine lens test won the Massachusetts telescope-maker the French Academy of Sciences' Lalande Prize that same year.
Q 10The lens that first revealed Sirius B had been ordered by the University of Mississippi; which event stopped its delivery?
The American Civil War
The American Civil War: fighting broke out before the lens left its Massachusetts makers, so it stayed in their workshop and was sold to astronomers in Chicago instead.
Q 11Sirius is one of the stars pictured on which country's national flag?
Brazil
Brazil: each star stands for a state or the capital district, and together they copy the sky over Rio de Janeiro on the morning the republic was declared in 1889.
Q 12Roughly what is the diameter of Sirius B?
About that of Earth
About that of Earth: yet it holds roughly as much matter as the whole Sun, packed so tightly that its surface gravity is hundreds of thousands of times stronger than our planet's.
Q 13Egypt's Sirius goddess Sopdet was later merged with which other goddess?
Isis
Isis: her husband Osiris was matched with neighbouring Orion, so the star and the constellation crossed the sky side by side as a divine couple.
Q 21In one account of the Polynesian 'Great Bird' constellation Manu, which part was Sirius?
The body
The body: other accounts make it the head, with other bright stars as the wingtips, and navigators from Micronesia to Polynesia steered by the giant bird.
Q 22Who discovered that Sirius and other 'fixed' stars had slowly moved since antiquity?
Edmond Halley
Edmond Halley: he compared the star positions of his own day with an ancient Greek catalogue and found that Sirius had drifted about half a degree, roughly the width of the Moon.
Q 23Sirius was the first star whose speed toward or away from us was measured, using whose effect?
Christian Doppler
Q 14Which annual event did the heliacal rising of Sirius herald in ancient Egypt?
The flooding of the Nile
The flooding of the Nile: Egyptians long believed the star itself caused the flood, and they worshipped it as a goddess who guaranteed the fertility of their land.
Q 15Sirius vanished from Egypt's sky for 70 days each year; which burial preparation traditionally took as long?
Mummification
Mummification: Egyptians read the star's absence as a passage through the underworld, and one of their own sky texts likens the seventy days stars spend there to the days the dead pass in the embalming house.
Q 16In Homer's Iliad, whose gleaming bronze armour is likened to Sirius as he runs toward Troy?
Achilles
Achilles: Homer calls the star the brightest of all but an evil omen that brings fever, and the charge ends with the warrior killing Troy's champion, Hector.
Q 17Romans blamed Sirius for a rust blight on which crop, sacrificing to the deity Robigo each April to protect it?
Wheat
Wheat: Ovid describes a priest leading a white-robed crowd to Robigo's grove, where the offering was meant to stop the star parching the ripening fields.
Q 18The islanders of Ceos sacrificed to Sirius and which Greek god, hoping for cooling breezes?
Zeus
Zeus: legend says the hero Aristaeus founded the double rite after a prophecy sent him to the island, and that it brought the Etesian winds that cool the Aegean each year.
Q 19Which season did the rising of Sirius mark for the Māori, who called it Takurua?
Winter
Winter: the same dawn rising meant high summer to the Greeks, but the seasons flip south of the equator, and the Māori word Takurua names both the star and the season.
Q 20Pacific navigators used Sirius as a latitude marker because it passes directly over which island group, near 17°S?
Fiji
Fiji: a star passes straight overhead only where the latitude matches its place in the sky, so sailors who saw Sirius cross the zenith knew they were level with these islands, or with Tahiti.
Christian Doppler: in 1868 William Huggins read a tiny shift in the star's spectral lines as speed, the same trick later used to show that the universe is expanding and to find planets round other stars.
Q 24Which ancient astronomer, working in Alexandria, described Sirius as reddish in his star catalogue?
Ptolemy
Ptolemy: Roman writers such as Seneca and Cicero called it ruddy too, which led some astronomers to wonder whether the star system had changed colour within recorded history, an idea now thought very unlikely.
Q 25Which two stars join Sirius to form the seasonal triangle seen on northern cold nights?
Procyon and Betelgeuse
Procyon and Betelgeuse: the neat triangle is a trick of perspective, since Procyon is a near neighbour of the Sun, as Sirius is, while Betelgeuse blazes from hundreds of light-years farther away.
Q 26Sirius is visible from almost everywhere on Earth, but it never rises in which of these places?
Svalbard
Svalbard: Sirius rides about 17 degrees south of the celestial equator, so it stays hidden from anywhere above roughly 73 degrees north, and these Arctic islands begin at 74.
Q 27Earth's wobbling axis will one day help turn Sirius into what?
Southern pole star
Southern pole star: in roughly 60,000 years the wobble and the star's own drift will carry Sirius to within two degrees of the pole, a brilliant marker for southern skies that today have only barely visible Sigma Octantis.
Q 28Which star will eventually replace Sirius as the brightest in Earth's night sky?
Vega
Vega: Sirius is still edging closer and brightening, but in about 210,000 years it will have drifted away again while Vega, itself approaching the Sun, grows bright enough to take over.
Q 29Roughly how much more luminous than the Sun is Sirius A?
About 25 times
About 25 times: that makes it a lightweight among famous stars, since a supergiant such as Rigel gives off tens of thousands of times the Sun's light.
Q 30Which spacecraft is expected to pass within 4.3 light-years of Sirius in the far future?
Voyager 2
Voyager 2: its power will run out long before, so the probe will drift past Sirius as a silent relic about 296,000 years from now, still carrying its golden record of Earth's sounds.