Quotes About Astrophysics

When gravitational waves reach the earth, the waves stretch and squeeze space. This is a tiny stretch and squeeze. Far too small to detect with ordinary human senses.

I would like to mention astrophysics; in this field, the strange properties of the pulsars and quasars, and perhaps also the gravitational waves, can be considered as a challenge.

The waves travel with the velocity of light and slightly squeeze and stretch space transverse to the direction of their motion. The first waves we measured came from the collision of two black holes each about 30 times the mass of our sun.

What was done is measure directly, with exquisitely sensitive instruments, gravitational waves predicted about 100 years ago by Albert Einstein. These waves are a new way to study the universe and are expected to have significant impact on astronomy and astrophysics in the years ahead.

We cannot explain the phenomenon of gravitational lensing without general relativity, and this is where MOND spectacularly fails.

One of the big mysteries about the black hole at the center of the galaxy is, 'Why don't we see emission from matter falling onto the black hole, or, rather, the black hole eating up its surroundings?'

I have suffered from exuberance, from being scattered, a lack of focus, he says. Conflicting enthusiasms caused him to switch scientific fields several times, from high-energy astrophysics to space physics, to particles and fields, and finally to planetary science.

No astrophysicist would deny the possibility of life. I think we're not creative enough to imagine what life would be like on another planet. Show me a dead alien. Better yet, show me a live one!

When you fall into a black hole, everything that falls in after you over millions of years, as seen by you inside the black hole, comes pounding down on you in a fraction of a second, because of the enormous differences of time flow.

We know that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means a number called the cosmological constant must be positive.

I'm a cosmologist. All I do is cosmology.

Maybe — just maybe — the taboo breached by Velikovsky is this: We are not supposed to think about Planetary Catastrophes.

Every astronomer loves the stars.

If the imprint is really due to gravitational waves from the big bang, then this is the type of cosmological discovery that comes along perhaps once every fifty years.

The giant black holes in the cores of galaxies, a million to 20 billion times heavier than the Sun, therefore, cannot have been born in the death of a star. They must have formed in some other way, perhaps by the agglomeration of many smaller black holes; perhaps by the collapse of massive clouds of gas.

De todas las ideas concebidas por la mente humana, desde los unicornios y las gárgolas a la bomba de hidrógeno, la más fantástica es, quizá, la del agujero negro:

singularities (places where space and time are infinitely warped)

The event horizon is the point at which the speed required to leave the vicinity of the black hole (the escape velocity) is the speed of light, and because Einstein's theory tells us that no material object can reach that speed, nothing can escape from within the event horizon.

The leading candidates for being the building blocks of dark matter are WIMPS, or "weakly interacting massive particles." They are called massive only in a relative sense, meaning they are larger than a proton or a hydrogen atom.

She also told me about the night one of her astrophysics friends went to a bar trivia contest where the final question was "What does Kelvin measure?" The winning answer was "heat," but her friend explained that Kelvin measures temperature, not heat, since heat is energy and is measured in energy units like joules or ergs. The astronomer refused to back down, until the battle had to be settled with a chug-off. These astro people are hard-core.

The brain is a three pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light-years across.

Some piously record 'In the beginning God', but I say 'In the beginning hydrogen'.

The mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first.

Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.