Quotes About Astronomy

Contemplated as one grand whole, astronomy is the most beautiful monument of the human mind; the noblest record of its intelligence.

We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy.

A handful of sand contains about 10,000 grains, more than the number of stars we can see with the naked eye on a clear night. But the number of stars we can see is only the tiniest fraction of the number of stars that are. What we see at night is the merest smattering of the nearest stars. Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.

we still talk about the Sun "rising" and the Sun "setting." It is 2,200 years since Aristarchus, and our language still pretends that the Earth does not turn. The

Sagan is an astronomer with one eye on the stars, another on history, and a third—his mind's—on the human condition.…

There is a place with four suns in the sky-red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth-and made of diamond....The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it

We are made of star-stuff. Our bodies are made of star-stuff. There are pieces of star within us all.

neither we nor our planet enjoys a privileged position in Nature. This insight has since been applied upward to the stars, and sideways to many subsets of the human family, with great success and invariable opposition. It has been responsible for major advances in astronomy, physics, biology, anthropology, economics and politics. I wonder if its social extrapolation is a major reason for attempts at its suppression.

The fifth regular solid must then, they thought, correspond to some fifth element that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies.

At depth on Jupiter and Saturn, the pressures are so great that atoms sweat electrons, and the air becomes a metal.

We are made of stellar ash.

Göz önünde tutmak'' anlam?ndaki Ä°ngilizce ''consider'' sözcüÄŸünün köken anlam? ÅŸudur: ''Gezegene bakarak konuÅŸmak.'' Gezegenlere bakarak konuÅŸmaksa oldukça ciddi bir iÅŸti.

GüneÅŸ'in yap?s?nda önce helyum bulunduÄŸu saptanm??t?r.(Yunanl?lar?n güneÅŸ tanr?s?na Helios ad?n? vermeleri nedeniyle helyum denilmiÅŸtir.)

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shining because of distant nuclear fusion. In

As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.

We are made of starstuff. Some

Would you say, "Billy, be home by the time the Earth has rotated enough so as to occult the Sun below the local horizon"? Billy would be long gone before you're finished.

If scientists can be fooled on the question of the simple interpretation of straightforward data of the sort that they are routinely obtaining from other kinds of astronomical objects, when the stakes are high, when the emotional predispositions are working, what must be the situation where the evidence is much weaker, where the will to believe is much greater, where the skeptical scientific tradition has hardly made a toehold - namely, in the area of religion?

There may be such intelligences and such starships, but pulsars are not their signature. Instead, they are the doleful reminders that nothing lasts forever; that stars also die.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. — Pale Blue Dot, 1994

The total number of such worlds are, as I said, something of the order of a trillion, or 10^12, a one followed by twelve zeros, of which Earth represents just one, all in the family of the Sun. And our star, of course, is one of a vast multitude.

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN'T SAVED HIM? Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes? NO Oh, come on. You can't expect me to believe that. It's an astronomical fact. THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN. ... Really? Then what would have happened, pray? A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.

A year ago astronomers across the Discworld had been puzzled to see the stars gently wheel across the sky as the world-turtle executed a roll. The thickness of the world never allowed them to see why, but Great A'Tuin's ancient head had snaked out and down and had snapped right out of the sky the speeding asteroid that would, had it hit, have meant that no one would ever have needed to buy a diary ever again.