Quotes About Astronomy

The astrolabe was a mechanical implementation of an object-oriented model of the sky.

Samuel Pierpont Langley, chief astronomer of Pittsburgh's Allegheny Observatory, who innovated the sale of time

The discovery of a wine is of greater moment than the discovery of a constellation. The universe is too full of stars.

I grew up in Bulgaria in a small city on the Black Sea Coast, so I was very interested in the sea, marine life, and everything related to it. But it was also a very dark place at night, so I could see the stars. And I just got very interested in it.

Finding the first seed black holes could help reveal how the relation between black holes and their host galaxies evolved over time.

We knew about black holes in other ways, and we knew about neutron stars - well, those are the two things that ultimately got seen.

Hubble showed us the marvel and majesty of stars being born.

I got lucky and got assigned to Hubble.

Hubble made my career.

In space there are countless constellations, suns and planets; we see only the suns because they give light; the planets remain invisible, for they are small and dark. There are also numberless earths circling around their suns...

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

The god believed by the Ancient Egyptians to have taught the principles of astronomy to their ancestors was Thoth: He who reckons in heaven, the counter of the stars, the enumerator of the earth and of what is therein, and the measurer of the earth.

Posts oriented into a Woodhenge, a huge circle for astronomical observations." "Like Stonehenge?" "Exactly like that. Or Cahokia, a similar site up in Illinois.

The moon, almost full, was pinned like a medal to the chest of the sky.

Recent results from astronomers who study the occasional gravitational lensing of unknown worlds by intervening stars suggest that orphan planets could be at least as numerous as the stars. In other words, there could be hundreds of billions of orphan worlds shuffling through our galaxy.

The mission of NASA's Kepler telescope is to lift the scales from our eyes and reveal to us just how typical our home world is. Kepler operates by measuring the dimming of stars as planets pass ('transit') in front of them. It has found thousands of previously unknown worlds.

There are physical bodies, physical worlds that astronauts could visit, that we haven't found yet. Especially, there's these close approaches of asteroids. They pass within geosynchronous orbit sometimes, and they pass within the Earth and the moon.

The usual metric for whether a planet is habitable or not is to ascertain whether liquid water could exist on its surface. Most worlds will either be too cold, too hot or of a type (like Jupiter) that may have no solid surface and be swaddled in noxious gases.

The math is dead simple: it seems that the frequency of planets able to support life is roughly one percent. In other words, a billion or more such worlds exist in our galaxy alone. That's a lot of acreage, and it takes industrial-strength credulity to believe it's all bleakly barren.

The bottom line is, like, one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds.

Becoming a scientist is a long journey, and at every step, I found projects that were exciting, motivating me to continue. My path was not straightforward - when I began studying physics in college, I had no idea I would end up studying asteroids; in fact, I never took an astronomy class.

Given the tendency of many to picture God's realm as somewhere high above Earth - an idea that sounds suspiciously like the Greek stories of deities perched on inaccessible mountain tops - it may seem plausible to assume that astronomers have special insight. Well, of course they don't.

Fourteen billion years after the Big Bang, the region of space we can directly see is populated by a few hundred billion galaxies, averaging a hundred billion stars each. We

It is not true to say that the sun is only incandescent gas, although this is an aspect of its reality. It is also as true to say that the sun is the symbol of the intelligible principle in the Universe and this element is as much an aspect of its ontological reality as the physical features discovered by modem astronomy.