Quotes About Astrophysics

Half of the stars you see aren't solo stars at all. They're double, multiple, triple, quadruple star systems. Even, for example, the nearest star to the sun, Alpha Centauri, that's a multiple star system.

Lense–Thirring effect, aka: frame-dragging).

You will never find scientists leading armies into battle. You just won't. Especially not astrophysicists - we see the biggest picture there is. We understand how small we are in the cosmos. We understand how fragile and temporary our existence is here on Earth.

I've been a big astrophysics nut since I was 12. I have always had a real soft spot for the bizarreness of quantum mechanics. But I gave up on being a scientist in high school - I'm just not that good at math.

Plainly, such an approach does not exclude other ways of trying to comprehend the world. Someone committed to it (as I am) can consistently believe (as I do) that we learn much more of human interest about how people think and feel and act by reading novels or studying history than from all of naturalistic psychology, and perhaps always will; similarly, the arts may offer appreciation of the heavens to which astrophysics cannot aspire.

Scientists seeking extraterrestrial intelligence have been struck by the Fermi paradox: Where are they? Astrophysics suggests that there should be intelligent life elsewhere. Maybe they are right; there really is intelligent life, and when it discovers the strange inhabitants of Planet Earth, it has the sense to stay far away.

That is, the infrared pictures taken by COBE point to the existence of matter from the very early universe that would ultimately form into galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?

I'm baffled all the time. We don't know what's driving 96% of the universe. Everybody you know and love and heard of and think about and see in the night sky through a telescope: four percent of the universe.

The universe starts off with the Big Bang theory, and the first thing that emerged from the Big Bang is essentially hydrogen and then helium. And that's what combusts in stars. Finally, stars implode, and they build heavier elements out of that. And those heavier elements are reconstituted in the heart of other stars, eventually.

I have always believed that astrophysics should be the extrapolation of laboratory physics, that we must begin from the present universe and work our way backward to progressively more remote and uncertain epochs.

Every field of astrophysics - whether it's our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe - every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.

I'm fascinated by the deaths of stars and the havoc they wreak on their environments.

A static universe isn't physically self-consistent.

We see no objects in our universe that could become wormholes as they age.

But another possibility is that a neutron star's center contains exotic particles called kaons. This would lower the critical mass compared

Stars that become supernovae start off at least eight times heavier than our sun. They're so short-lived that, even if they have planets, there is unlikely to be time for life to get started. The surface is 40,000C and, as a result, the colouring will be extremely blue.

Dark matter is one of the dominant constituents of the universe, which piled up in certain parts of the universe due to gravity, and in those regions, galaxies were formed. It is the unseen thing that holds the universe together.

Joe Rogan has this podcast where he's talking astrophysics and lean BMI indexes and weird philosophy most of the time and yet, when you see him onstage, you're like, 'Oh, this guy is just a killer comedian.'

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson—appearing in an old clip from the Cosmos television show—declared good-naturedly, "If a Creator designed our universe to support life, he did a terrible job. In the vast, vast majority of the cosmos, life would die instantly from lack of atmosphere, gamma-ray bursts, deadly pulsars, and crushing gravitational fields. Believe me, the universe is no Garden of Eden.

Every five minutes, a pair of black holes merges somewhere in the universe, pouring gravitational waves out into space.

Schwarzschild radius,

An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star's life.

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has proved that if two black holes unite, the surface area of the final black hole must exceed the sum of the surface areas of the initial black holes. For these reasons the total black-hole portion of the universe is ever increasing.