Q 01/05

Ceres orbits in the main asteroid belt, between Jupiter and which other planet?

A) Mars

B) Earth

C) Saturn

D) Venus

Answer · why

A) Mars

Mars. Jupiter's gravity is thought to have kept the rubble out there from ever gathering into a full planet, leaving Ceres as the biggest piece.

Q 02/05

What was Giuseppe Piazzi compiling at his telescope when he came across Ceres in 1801?

A) A chart of the Milky Way

B) A record of sunspots

C) A catalogue of star positions

D) A calendar of eclipses

Answer · why

C) A catalogue of star positions

A catalogue of star positions. On New Year's night he logged a faint 'star' that his lists did not show, and over the next few evenings he watched it ...

Q 03/05

Piazzi found Ceres from an observatory on which island?

A) Malta

B) Crete

C) Sardinia

D) Sicily

Answer · why

D) Sicily

Sicily. Piazzi ran the observatory at Palermo, and he named his find after the island's patron goddess.

Q 04/05

Piazzi privately suspected Ceres was 'something better', but what did he first report it as?

A) A comet

B) A planet

C) A nebula

D) A double star

Answer · why

A) A comet

A comet. It showed no fuzzy halo and its motion was slow and steady, so he suspected a planet, but he wrote that he was careful not to say so in publi...

Q 05/05

Which 24-year-old mathematician invented a new orbit method to recover Ceres after it was lost in the Sun's glare?

A) Joseph-Louis Lagrange

B) Pierre-Simon Laplace

C) Carl Friedrich Gauss

D) Leonhard Euler

Answer · why

C) Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss. His predicted position differed from those of other astronomers, yet when Ceres was sighted again it lay close to where he had s...