Quotes About Astronomy

heliocentric orbits, come too close to the sun's heat

Wolf-Rayet stars

What is BFR?" asked Pete Starling. For the graph's vertical scale was labeled thus. "Bolide Fragmentation Rate

Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

Unlike what you may be told in other sectors of life, when observing the universe, size does matter, which often leads to polite 'telescope envy' at gatherings of amateur astronomers.

It is the destiny of stars to collapse.

In 5-billion years the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.

Without a doubt, the most spectacular way to die in space is to fall into a black hole.

On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air. (Yes, I did the math.)

Dark matter is a mysterious substance that has gravity but does not interact with light in any known way.

The easy part is the ray's 500-second speed-of-light jaunt from the Sun to Earth, through the void of interplanetary space. The hard part is the light's million-year adventure to get from the Sun's center to its surface.

To picture a pulsar, imagine the mass of the Sun packed into a ball the size of Manhattan. If that's hard to do, then maybe it's easier if you imagine stuffing about a billion elephants into a Chapstick casing.

There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all the humans who ever lived.

night and day, a hundred billion neutrinos from the Sun pass through each square inch of your body, every second, without a trace of interaction with your body's atoms.

I don't know about you, but the planet Saturn pops into my mind with every bite of a hamburger I take.

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices.

The day gets about one second longer every 67,000 years.

Neptune, the outermost planet. No, it's not Pluto. Get over it.

After 7 or 8 billion years of such enrichment, an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born in an undistinguished region (the Orion arm) of an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo supercluster). The gas cloud from which the Sun formed contained a sufficient supply of heavy elements to spawn a few planets, thousands of asteroids, and billions of comets.

Celestial happenings, however, don't limit themselves to what's convenient for the human retina.

That is, cosmic dark matter enjoys about six times the mass of all the visible matter.

The one we call Earth formed in a kind of Goldilocks zone around the Sun, where oceans remain largely in liquid form.

Our planet Earth has a diameter of 0.04 light-seconds. Neptune's orbit spans 8 light-hours. The stars of the Milky Way galaxy delineate a broad, flat disk about 100,000 light-years across. And the Virgo supercluster of galaxies, to which the Milky Way belongs, extends some 60 million light-years.

These largely empty volumes of space—the far-rural regions of each galaxy—contain too little visible matter to explain the anomalously high orbital speeds of the tracers.