Quotes About Astronomy

He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.

He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.

In 1616, a pope and a cardinal inquisitor reprimanded Galileo, warning him to curtail his forays into the supernal realms. The motions of the heavenly bodies, they said, having been touched upon in the Psalms, the Book of Joshua, and elsewhere in the Bible, were matters best left to the Holy Fathers of the Church.

there was something about the largest object in the solar system vanishing that tended to disrupt normal schedules.

we inhabit a universe that is nuclear powered. All the stars draw energy from nuclear reactions;

But my most favourite pursuit, after my daily exertions at the Foundry, was Astronomy. There were frequently clear nights when the glorious objects in the Heavens were seen in most attractive beauty and brilliancy.

A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion.

If we consider the scale of the universe, we begin to see just how ridiculous belief in astrology can be.

superbolide meteors, averaging seventeen to twenty meters across. They each struck with the energy equivalent of eight atomic bombs.

the Kuiper belt, a region of icy asteroids past the orbit of Neptune, drawing an entourage of rocks in its wake and splashing them across the earth. The Kuiper belt contained over thirty thousand asteroids larger than a hundred kilometers in diameter, along with being the home to many short-period comets like the famous Halley's comet.

Any astronomer can predict with absolute accuracy just where every star in the universe will be at 11.30 tonight. He can make no such prediction about his teenage daughter.

Space, it says, is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen...

Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.

A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and quite a lot of millions of light-years from end to end.

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

There's a respected theory in astronomy called Panspermia," Glinn finally continued. "It holds that life may have spread through the galaxy in bacteria or spores carried on meteorites or in clouds of dust. But

Before them will lie billions of other galaxies, over distances we can quantify but can't really comprehend.

It was an exceedingly odd thing to see an elephant in a spacesuit.

It took time for light to reach the Eye from distant galaxies. The further out the Eye looked, the further it looked back into the history of the universe. Galaxies ten million light years away were glimpsed as they were ten million years earlier; those a billion light years away offered a window into the universe when it was a billion years younger than the present epoch.

An eclipse is one phenomenon that is actually more impressive from the ground.

My dad's a physicist and had a key to the St Andrew's observatory, and we used to pop down to see Halley's Comet and Saturn and meteor showers.

The main reason why people should care about research in fundamental physics is the same reason they care about astronomy and cosmology. People, children, want to know what we're made out of, how it works, and why the universe is the way it is.

Space, the whole universe - I know no better place to find new physics.

Jupiter, a world far larger than Earth, is so warm that it currently radiates more internal heat than it receives from the Sun.