Quotes About Astronomy

As pointed out by David Jewitt, the name "Kuiper belt" then follows Stigler's law, which states, "no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.

near-Earth objects that approach the Earth's orbit to within 0.05 AU, which is roughly the distance that a near-Earth object's trajectory can be gravitationally altered by a single planetary encounter.

Interplanetary dust," I repeated, liking the feel of the words on my tongue.

I hereby excommunicate you from the Milky Way!

Astronomy, mixed with astrology, occupied a large number of tablets in the Babylonian libraries

The Whirlpool galaxy beautifully displays its spiral nature while mysteriously hiding exactly how it spins the way it does.

The Sumerians plotted the movements of the five planets they could see – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – and named a day after each. They then named one day after the Moon and another after the Sun, giving them a seven-day week.

if the Sun disappeared instantaneously, the Earth would continue to orbit the position of the Sun for seven minutes until the bad news reached us in the form of gravitational waves.

Moreover, since the sun remains stationary, whatever appears as a motion of the sun is really due rather to the motion of the earth.

Whenever a total eclipse of the sun was visible in an accessible region parties were sent out to observe it.

One of the key differences between galaxies with super massive black holes is whether or not the black holes are lit up, because they are basically bingeing on a lot of material in its surroundings.

Accordingly, since nothing prevents the earth from moving, I suggest that we should now consider also whether several motions suit it, so that it can be regarded as one of the planets. For, it is not the center of all the revolutions.

I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don't know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.

Our moon was born too small to harbor life. It came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch spun a disk of rocks that condensed into a satellite.

Hubble is very close to my heart, and going back to Hubble, because I was there once already in 1993, is really a great privilege for me.

We explore astronomical life through medicate experience, and we live life through love and ardvarks.

Great telescopes like the Kecks allow us to explore the River of Time back toward its source.

If you go to planetary science meetings and hear technical talks on Pluto, you will hear experts calling it a planet every day.

We look at distant exploding stars called supernovae, and we've developed techniques to measure how far away they are and how fast they're moving away from us.

When I was in my teens, Yehudi Menuhin, who was at work on his project 'The Music of Man,' introduced me to the great astronomer Carl Sagan. It was Sagan who first opened my eyes to the magnitude of the universe, and essentially to the notion of 'music of the spheres.'

The Hubble Telescope can see the farthest galaxies. The Webb Telescope will see the farthest stars.

I can't imagine anywhere I'd rather be than outside the space shuttle in my space suit next to the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Hubble Space Telescope is more than remarkable. It has answered just so many of those fundamental questions that people have been asking about the cosmos since people were able to ask questions.

I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.