Astronomy Crossword Puzzle - Free

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Here's a free Astronomy crossword puzzle, a fun way to exercise your brain. Solve the puzzle online or print it out.

To solve it online, click the Solve Online button under the picture of the puzzle. This opens the crossword in a pop-up window.

This puzzle is part of the free online brain games collection. For a list of all my free crosswords, visit the Easy Printable Crossword Puzzles page.

Astronomy Crossword Puzzle Instructions

If you like this Astronomy crossword puzzle, check out the other word games on this site, including Hangman Classic and the free online word searches collection, which includes a Chemistry word search puzzle among many others.

And if you happen to know a child or adult with cognitive special needs, consider printing out and giving them some of my free Special Needs word search puzzles. These word searches have been simplified to make the puzzles more accessible to individuals with autism, traumatic brain injury, memory loss due to brain surgery, Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia, or other cognitive special needs. The solutions are included as well.

HOW TO PLAY. Using your memory and logic skills, use the provided clues to figure out the words hidden in the puzzle. The hidden words are arranged in a criss-cross grid, where the words overlap each other at common letters.

For the online version of the Astronomy crossword, click any row or column to highlight it and display the clue. The clue is shown at the top of the puzzle.

If you have a guess for the answer for the clue, type it in the grid. As you work on the puzzle, you can go back and change any of the words you've typed in previously.

To print the crossword and solve it on paper, click the gear icon in the upper right of the puzzle window. Then click the "Printable Version" option to display the printable crossword.

To see the full solution online for the Astronomy crossword, choose the "Show the Puzzle Solution" option in the gear menu.

The puzzle solution is also provided with the printable version. The solution appears on page 2.

Best of luck solving the puzzle!

Astronomy Crossword - Interesting Facts

To help put you in the mood to solve this Astronomy Crossword puzzle, here are a few interesting facts about astronomy from SeedScientific.com:

The Asteroid Ceres Is Pretty Big. The largest asteroid in our solar system — Ceres — has a diameter of 580 miles (940 km).

In 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid contains roughly one-third of the entire asteroid belt's mass!

Ceres is the only "dwarf planet" inside Neptune's orbit and the largest object in the main asteroid belt.
Polaris and Vega Take Turns. The North Star changes every 26,000 years.

Earth's axis goes through a process known as "precession" — a change in the orientation of a rotating body's rotational axis. Because of that, our perception of the north gradually shifts to different stars over a 26,000-year cycle.

Our ancestors began understanding astronomy millennia ago and used the North Star for navigation. Several thousand years ago, Vega was the North Star, and it will gain that status again in around 12,000 years.

However, in 26,000 years, Polaris will return to its original position as the Earth's polar star.
A Light-Year Is More Than a Trillion Miles. Scientists from various fields of astronomy use "light-years" to measure the distance between celestial objects. A light-year is the distance light travels in an Earth year.

Light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/s), and one light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km).

Since light needs so much time to reach us, whenever we are looking at celestial objects, we see them in the past. For example, the Sun is 8 light minutes away from us, so each time we look at it, we always see it as it was 8 minutes ago.