Quotes About Astronomy

It was probably my parents who inspired me most. My father was a scientist and answered my scientific questions, while my mother took me on walks and showed me birds and plants. She also took me out at night and showed me the constellations and the aurora.

Astrobiology is the science of life in the universe. It's an attempt to scientifically deal with the question of whether or not we're alone in the universe, looking at the past of life, the present of life, and the future of life. It's an interdisciplinary study incorporating astronomy, biology, and the Earth sciences.

Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in.

It's best not to stare at the sun during an eclipse.

Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus.

Scarce any problem will appear more hard and difficult, than that of determining the distance of the Sun from the Earth very near the truth: but even this... will without much labour be effected.

The sun is the most parallel light source because it is so far away.

At rest, however, in the middle of everything is the sun.

Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole. It's actually not massive enough.

I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. I know rather that the sun, around which my planet Earth revolves, is a middle sized star in a galaxy called the Milky Way that has over a hundred billion other suns or stars within it.

The bottom line is that the position of the Sun relative to the stars slowly changes for any given date, and over the course of 26,000 years, it can easily slide between constellations. So you may think you're a Pisces, but you're actually an Aquarius.

As an astronomer, I get to ignore the details of the things that we don't understand. There's a lot of work that we can do on scales that we do understand, and there is actually a finite size that I can associate with a super massive black hole.

Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology.

Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.

Outside, a weather of stars ran clear in an ocean sky.

La probabilidad de que se forme la vida a partir de la materia inanimada es una en 1040.000... Es lo suficientemente grande como para sepultar a Darwin y toda la teoría de la evolución. No hubo un caldo primigenio, ni en este planeta ni en ningún otro, y si los inicios de la vida no fueron al azar, debieron haber sido el producto de la inteligencia con propósito". Sir Fred Hoyle, profesor de astronomía de la Universidad de Cambridge.

It does not matter; there's many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us of a night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphere of its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to the astronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition, weight, path--the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of its light--a sort of scientific scandal-mongering.

The demonstration must be against learning—science. But not every science will do. The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy. Since bombs are your means of expression, it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics. But that is impossible… What do you think of having a go at astronomy?

I defy the ingenuity of journalists to persuade their public that any given member of the proletariat can have a personal grievance against astronomy. Starvation itself could hardly be dragged in there - eh? And there are other advantages. The whole civilized world has heard of Greenwich... Yes, he continued, with a contemptuous smile, the blowing up of the first meridian is bound to raise a howl of execration.

I don't want to pull a Brahe.

If an object - a star, for instance, like our own sun - is eight hundred light years away from the Earth, it would take light leaving that object eight hundred years until it reached our eyes. So when you look at that object, you are seeing it as it appeared eight hundred light years ago, not as it looks today. It might not even exist anymore. Every time you look up at the stars, you are looking into the past.

If there's a red dwarf in Canis Major, and it isn't named Clifford, I'm going to say a swear word.

And in his eyes The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak, In different skies.

Outer space is everything.