Quotes About Astronomy

Some readers may realize that this story, first published in 1956, has been overtaken by events. In 1965, astronomers discovered that Mercury does not keep one side always to the Sun, but has a period of rotation of about fifty-four days, so that all parts of it are exposed to the sunlight at one time or another. Well, what can I do except say that I wish astronomers would get things right to begin with? And I certainly refuse to change the story to suit their whims.

Re the temperature of Venus's surface No one had expected such a hot Venus

If you put Earth out beyond Neptune, you wouldn't be able to call it a planet because it couldn't clear its zone.

The Kuiper belt region, which I call the third zone because it lies beyond the rocky terrestrial planets and beyond the giant planets, is a bizarre frontier.

In order to know the true situation of a Planet at any particular time, the small set of balls are to be put each on its respective axis; then the winch to be turned round until each index points to the given time.

I turned my attention for a while to gamma ray astronomy and soon began the first in a continous series of experiments at the Savannah River site to study the properties of the neutrino.

Revealing water in significant quantities on the Moon could truly be a turning point in space exploration.

We are the laws of chemistry and physics as they have played out here on Earth, and we are now learning that planets are as common as stars. Most stars, as it turns out now, will have planets.

The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.

I have always loved astronomy, and being an astronomer once lurked in the back of my mind. But I was never good at algebra. In fact, I flunked it twice in high school.

One of the jovian moons, Europa, is coated with twice as much liquid water as is sloshing around our planet.

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

I'd like to convince you that the universe has a soundtrack and that soundtrack is played on space itself, because space can wobble like a drum.

When we initially proposed LIGO, the only sources that we were really contemplating were supernovae. We thought we would see something like one a year, maybe even ten a year.

The head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician.

The boundary between space and the earth is purely arbitrary. And I'll probably always be interested in this planet - it's my favorite.

Aside from communications satellites, space is devoid of industry.

Radio astronomers are aware in the back of their minds that if there are other civilizations out there in space, it might be the radio astronomers who first pick up the signal.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upward, and leads us from this world to another." – Aristocles, son of Ariston

black holes generate an amazing amount of light. The problem is, their gravity is so great, the light can't escape—it just gets pulled in along with everything else.

There are about three hundred billion stars to a galaxy, and more than eighty billion galaxies in the known universe. That means that if only one in a million planets can support life, and one in a million of those actually has life, and one in a million of those planets has intelligent life . . . then there are at least one and a half million civilizations out there.

he argued, was not perfectly round but "in the shape of a pear

The Olmec, Maya, and other Mesoamerican societies were world pioneers in mathematics and astronomy—but they did not use the wheel. Amazingly, they had invented the wheel but did not employ it for any purpose other than children's toys. Those looking for a tale of cultural superiority can find it in zero; those looking for failure can find it in the wheel.

We are all truly made of star stuff.18