Quotes About Astronomy

As astronomy is the daughter of idleness, geometry is the daughter of property, and if it were a question of poetry we would likely find that she is the daughter of love.

There are just as many stars in the sky at noon as at midnight, although we cannot see them in the sun's glare.

The 1856 standard textbook, Olmsted's School Astronomy, informed students that, according to no less an authority than William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus, the Sun was inhabited by humanlike creatures who lived on its surface.

I can easily conceive, most Holy Father, that as soon as some people learn that in this book which I have written concerning the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, I ascribe certain motions to the Earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected.

I am a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, where I teach an introductory class in cosmology. I see the deficiencies that first-year students show up with.

In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.

There is good evidence that Venus once had liquid water and a much thinner atmosphere, similar to Earth billions of years ago. But today the surface of Venus is dry as a bone, hot enough to melt lead, there are clouds of sulfuric acid that reach a hundred miles high and the air is so thick it's like being 900 meters deep in the ocean.

Like many astronomers who use the great telescopes on Mauna Kea, I have participated personally and joyfully in ceremonies to celebrate the profound cosmic understanding that comes from joining ancient Hawaiian navigator traditions with the techniques of modern astronomy.

In 1999, my team discovered that the star Upsilon Andromedae was circled by three gas-giant planets - the first distant multiplanet system ever found. That same year, other researchers observed the first 'transit' of an exoplanet - a planet blocking out a small fraction of the starlight as it passes in front of the star.

At six-fifteen the sun snuck up and mugged the moon.

Solitario como un astrónomo que en su observatorio contempla cada noche, por la diminuta abertura de su telescopio, las miríadas de estrellas, sus misteriosas evoluciones, su cambiante confusión, cómo desaparecen yvuelven a encenderse, Jakob Mendel miraba a través de sus gafas y desde aquella mesa cuadrada ese otro universo de los libros, que asimismo gira eternamente y renace transformado,aquel mundo sobre nuestro mundo.

Mi sorpresa al darme cuenta de que aquellos empujoncitos a unas figuras de un tablero eran lo mismo que mis devaneos por los espacios del pensamiento podría compararse a la de un astrónomo que a fuerza de cálculos complicados sobre un papel deduce la existencia de un nuevo planeta, y después lo ve realmente en el cielo, un astro blanco, claro, sustancial.

If only we studied the stars as much as we study our own reflections.

Isn't the universe full of gaseous elements?" Andrew says, "Yeah, there are gases and neutrinos and this shit they call dark matter.

The earth also is spherical, since it presses upon its center from every direction.

We really have only been observing Neptune with big telescopes since shortly before 1989.

When I first heard that a comet was going to hit Jupiter, my reaction was, 'Eh. So what? Jupiter's huge. Comets are small. And so when I saw the first impact site and it was huge and dark, I was flabbergasted.

I read a lot of astronomy magazines, and go to a lot of astronomy sites, and physics sites. I love reading about quantum computation and quantum physics. I don't understand it all, but I love reading it over and over again so that I think I have some idea of what they're talking about.

The massive bulk of the earth does indeed shrink to insignificance in comparison with the size of the heavens.

The most remarkable part of all is your DNA. You have a metre of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single fine strand it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto. Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.

The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh more than 500 billion kilograms.

The one thing he didn't do was discover the comet that bears his name.

The Moon is slipping from our grasp at a rate of about 1.5 inches a year. In another two billion years it will have receded so far that it won't keep us steady and we will have to come up with some other solution, but in the meantime you should think of it as much more than just a pleasant feature in the night sky.

Travelling faster than a bullet, an incoming meteor would be moving much too swiftly to be seen, much less to provoke alarm. (Credit