Supernova Trivia
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49 free Supernova trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This supernova trivia quiz covers the most violent thing a star can do. The easy questions handle the basics: what a supernova is, the two ways one can happen, what gets left behind, how bright it can get and roughly how often our galaxy produces one. The harder end goes into the details astronomers argue about: the Chandrasekhar limit, why Type Ia explosions make such good standard candles, the radioactive nickel and cobalt that keep the glow going for months, the naming scheme that produced SN 2021afdx, the 1054 explosion that left the Crab Nebula, Tycho and Kepler's naked-eye stars, the neutrino burst from SN 1987A, the amateur in Argentina who caught a shock breakout, and which nearby stars might be next. Every answer was checked against the supernova encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our astronomy, Milky Way and space quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01At its peak, a single supernova can briefly give off as much light as what?
A whole galaxy
A whole galaxy: for a few weeks one exploding star can match the light of the billions of stars around it, before fading over the following months.
Q 02When a massive star's core collapses in a supernova, what can it leave behind?
Neutron star or black hole
Neutron star or black hole: which one forms depends on how much mass the collapsing core holds, and some blasts leave nothing but a spreading cloud of debris.
Q 03Supernovae should light up the Milky Way about twice a century, so why has none been seen for 400 years?
Dust hides them
Dust hides them: most of the Milky Way's stars sit behind thick clouds in the galaxy's disc, which block visible light, so blasts on the far side never show up in our sky.
Q 04The last supernova seen inside the Milky Way, in 1604, bears the name of which astronomer?
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler: he was one of many who watched the blast of 1604, and his detailed account attached his name to it; none has been seen in our galaxy since.
Q 05In which satellite galaxy of the Milky Way did SN 1987A explode?
The Large Magellanic Cloud
The Large Magellanic Cloud: the 1987 blast there was the nearest supernova in centuries, so astronomers have been able to watch a star's death and its aftermath unfold in detail ever since.
Q 06Astronomers expected a red supergiant, so what kind of star surprised them by exploding as SN 1987A?
A blue supergiant
A blue supergiant: old photographs showed the doomed star, Sanduleak -69 202, was a hot blue giant, a kind that theory had not expected to blow up, and it had vanished once the blast faded.
Q 07Walter Baade coined the word 'supernova' around 1931 with which colleague, who also proposed dark matter?
Fritz Zwicky
Fritz Zwicky: he and Baade began using the word in lectures around 1931, and in 1933 Zwicky argued that unseen dark matter must be holding the Coma galaxy cluster together.
Q 08The Latin word 'nova', from which supernova derives, means what?
New
It refers to what looks like a temporary new star; the 'super-' prefix separates these blasts from far fainter ordinary novae.
Q 09Seen from China to Europe in 1006, the supernova in Lupus holds which record?
The brightest
The brightest: it probably outshone every star people have ever written down, far brighter than Venus, and Chinese annals say objects on the ground could be seen by its light at night.
Q 10What did the supernova that Chinese astronomers recorded in AD 1054 leave behind?
The Crab Nebula
The Crab Nebula: the blast of 1054 was bright enough to see in daytime, and its debris, about 6,500 light-years away, is still spreading outward today.
Q 11Which astronomer measured the 1572 supernova in Cassiopeia so carefully that it now carries his name?
Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe: he showed the new star of 1572 lay far beyond the Moon, a blow to the old belief that the heavens never change.
Q 12Cassiopeia A marks a blast from around 1680, so what is odd about it?
Nobody reported seeing it
Nobody reported seeing it: the star blew up inside our own galaxy, yet no certain record survives, though John Flamsteed may have logged it as a faint ordinary star in 1680.
Q 13A star that flared in 1885 proved to be the first supernova ever seen beyond the Milky Way, in which galaxy?
The Andromeda Galaxy
Q 21What decides whether a supernova is classified Type I or Type II?
Hydrogen lines in its light
Hydrogen lines in its light: Type II blasts show them and Type I blasts do not, a label read purely off the light, so stars that die in quite different ways can end up sharing the Type I tag.
Q 22A strong line of which element in its light marks a supernova as Type Ia?
Silicon
Silicon: the star burns up in seconds and silicon is among the ash, so its line near 615 nanometres gives the type away, while Type Ib shows helium instead and Type Ic shows neither.
Q 23In a Type IIn supernova, the n describes the lines in its spectrum, so what does it stand for?
Narrow
The Andromeda Galaxy: several observers noticed the star in August 1885, but only Ernst Hartwig in Estonia realised its significance and reported it, so he is counted as its discoverer.
Q 14Supernovae are thought to be a major source of which fast particles that rain down on Earth from space?
Cosmic rays
Cosmic rays: trapped in the wreckage of an exploded star, protons and other nuclei bounce back and forth across its blast wave until they near the speed of light and escape.
Q 15Chinese astronomers recorded the oldest known supernova, which lingered for eight months in AD 185, as what kind of star?
A guest star
A guest star: the record gives a date and a place in the southern sky, which let astronomers eighteen centuries later match it to the debris cloud RCW 86, probably its remains.
Q 16Testing a new camera in 2016, Argentine amateur Victor Buso happened to photograph which fleeting event?
A supernova's first light
A supernova's first light: his run of short exposures of the galaxy NGC 613 showed a new point of light appear and brighten within about an hour, a moment professionals had long hoped to catch.
Q 17Any one galaxy hosts only a few supernovae a century, so how are new ones found weekly?
Scanning countless galaxies
Scanning countless galaxies: surveys keep watch on so many of them night after night that blasts turn up all the time, though any single one produces only two or three a century.
Q 18What does the SNEWS project use to give early warning of a Milky Way supernova?
A network of neutrino detectors
A network of neutrino detectors: these ghostly particles escape the collapsing core hours before the light breaks out, so detectors around the world can alert astronomers in time to watch.
Q 19In the supernova name SN 2003C, what does the C signify?
The third one reported that year
The third one reported that year: capital letters A to Z cover the first 26, then lower-case pairs such as aa and ab take over, which is how 2005 ran as far as SN 2005nc.
Q 20The Sun sits inside a huge cavity of thin gas carved out by a string of ancient supernovae, called the Local what?
Bubble
Bubble: the first blasts went off over ten million years ago, when the Sun was far away, and only millions of years later did the Sun drift into the cavity they had cleared.
The narrow spectral lines come from ejecta ploughing into a small dense cloud the star shed shortly before dying.
Q 24What feature gives Type II-P supernovae their name?
A plateau in the light curve
The brightness holds roughly steady for months as hydrogen in the ejecta recombines; II-L 'linear' types lack it.
Q 25What kind of star explodes as a Type Ia supernova?
A white dwarf in a binary
A white dwarf in a binary: it steals gas from its companion, or merges with a second white dwarf, until runaway fusion blows the whole star apart.
Q 26A white dwarf that grows past about 1.4 times the Sun's mass is doomed, a limit named after which astrophysicist?
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: he worked on the limit as a student and Arthur Eddington attacked it in public in 1935, yet the result held and he went on to win a Nobel Prize.
Q 27Why are Type Ia supernovae so useful to cosmologists?
They work as standard candles
They work as standard candles: each one peaks at nearly the same true brightness, so how dim it looks from Earth reveals how far away its galaxy lies.
Q 28In 1998 two teams found distant supernovae dimmer than expected, which showed what about the universe?
Its expansion is speeding up
Its expansion is speeding up: fainter than predicted meant farther away than a steadily expanding universe allows, a shock that earned the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Q 29Supernova surveys of the 1990s pointed physicists to which unseen ingredient, now thought to make up most of the universe?
Dark energy
Dark energy: nobody knows what it is, but it is the name given to whatever is driving the cosmos apart, and it is reckoned to make up more than two thirds of everything there is.
Q 30The radioactive decay of which isotope powers a Type Ia light curve?
Nickel-56
Nickel-56: it decays to cobalt-56 with a half-life of about six days, and the cobalt's slower decay keeps the wreckage glowing for months.