Quotes About Astronomy

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is…

knowledge right now, there are two trillion galaxies in the known Universe, each with an average of a hundred billion stars. Which comes to two hundred billion trillion stars in total. And

there are two trillion galaxies in the known Universe, each with an average of a hundred billion stars. Which comes to two hundred billion trillion stars in total.

His (Islamic astronomer al-Farghani) legacy also endures through the Italian writer and poet Dante (1265-1321), who derived most of the astronomical knowledge he included in his DIVINE COMEDY from the writings of al-Farghani (whom he referred to by his Latin name, Alfraganus).

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion

The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper's seven stars speed in different directions.

But even in elementary school and junior high, I was very interested in space and in the space program.

Astronomers are obsessed with building larger and larger telescopes. There are two promises that we make with bigger telescopes: that they can see fainter things and that they see more detail. But it's been really hard to follow through on that second promise because of atmospheric distortion.

When we meet people who are astronauts or deal in astronomy, it's always really fascinating.

So important is this dark matter to our understanding of the size, shape, and ultimate fate of the universe that the search for it will very likely dominate astronomy for the next few decades.

So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.

Canada and space are a natural fit.

How do you observe something you can't see? This is the basic question of somebody who's interested in finding and studying black holes. Because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light, so you can't see it directly.

There are thousands of asteroids whose orbit in the Solar System crosses that of Earth. And we have a little acronym for them - NEOs: near Earth objects. And our biggest goal is to try to catalogue them, so we know in advance if one is going to put us at risk.

As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.

Hubble orbits high, outside Earth's atmosphere so it can see a wide spectrum of light our atmosphere blocks.

Generally speaking, exoplanets can be any size, and they are found in a wide range of orbits. Some have massive gas atmospheres; others are smaller with an icy or rocky composition.

Super-Earths are how we call a family of planets... up to two times larger and about ten times more massive than the Earth.

But when researchers at Bell Labs discovered that static tends to come from particular places in the sky, the whole field of radio astronomy opened up.

The central region of the Milky Way, known as the bulge, is stuffed with literally tens of billions of stars. And most of these are old - considerably older than our Sun or its neighbors - because this part of the galaxy formed first. Consequently, bulge stars are generally deficient in heavy elements.

People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.

Foucault calculated that the number of degrees through which the pendulum's plane of oscillation would shift in twenty-four hours would be 360 degrees times the sine of the latitude—which thus provided a way to determine the person's north-south location on the globe.

Observatory n, A place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors.

LUNARIAN, n. An inhabitant of the moon, as distinguished from Lunatic, one whom the moon inhabits.