Quotes About Astronomy

On canvas with paint In the Artist's school It's red that is hot And blue that is cool. But in science we show As the heat gets higher That a star will glow red Like the coals of a fire. Raise the heat some more And what is in sight? It's no longer red It has turned bright white. Yet the hottest of all, Merlin says unto you, Is neither white nor red When the star has turned blue.

Earth's oceans will boil away about a billion years

Earth's Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size in the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system

Our star, and most stars, are made mostly of hydrogen, which is the number one element in the universe: 90% of all atomic nuclei are hydrogen, about 8% are helium, and the remaining 2% comprise all the other elements in the periodic table. All

Further analysis of the Sun's spectrum revealed the signature of an element that had no known counterpart on Earth. Being of the Sun, the new substance was given a name derived from the Greek word helios ("the Sun"), and was only later discovered in the lab. Thus, helium became the first and only element in the chemist's Periodic Table to be discovered someplace other than Earth.

Last I had kept count, there were fifty-six moons among the planets in the solar system. Then I woke up one morning to learn that another dozen had been discovered around Saturn. After that incident, I decided to no longer keep track. All I care about now is whether any of them would be fun places to visit or to study

Indeed, the very word "galaxy" derives from the Greek galaxias, "milky.

Last I had kept count, there were fifty-six moons among the planets in the Solar System. Then I woke up one morning to learn that another dozen had been discovered around Saturn. After that incident, I decided to no longer keep track.

The Coma cluster is also what we call a "relaxed" system. Please resist the image of a group of galaxies kicking back and listening to smooth jazz.

At the altitude of about 23,000 miles the satellite takes 23 hours and 56 minutes to orbit Earth. Earth takes 23 hours and 56 minutes to rotate.

Jupiter acts as a gravitational shield for Earth, a burly big brother, allowing long (hundred-million-year) stretches of relative peace and quiet on Earth. Without Jupiter's protection, complex life would have a hard time becoming interestingly complex, always living at risk of extinction from a devastating impact.

What you might not have come across is the fact that Hubble is basically a photoreconnaissance satellite whose cameras point upward at the heavens rather than downward at Earth.

Here in our solar system, a hundred-meter-wide asteroid sails into Earth every millennium or so at speeds upward of fifty thousand miles an hour, generating a destructive impact equal to 2,500 atomic bombs.

planetary orbit, for example, is described quite simply as the response of a planet to the curvature of space in the vicinity of the Sun.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Every time you turn a bigger telescope to the night sky, we end up smaller than we had previously imagined…It is an ego-dismantling device

Astronomers think much of Earth's oceans could have been formed by comets striking our planet and depositing their water on Earth's surface.

Half of the stars you see aren't solo stars at all. They're double, multiple, triple, quadruple star systems. Even, for example, the nearest star to the sun, Alpha Centauri, that's a multiple star system.

Had Herschel succeeded, the planet list would read: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and George.

A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year—nearly six trillion miles or ten trillion kilometers. 2.

If it weren't for Jupiter, you can justifiably question whether Earth could have ever made it from simple life to complex life." ?

Meteor Crater A 150-foot-wide metallic meteor struck the Mogollon Rim in modern-day Arizona 50,000 years ago, leaving a mile-wide hole that's 60 stories deep.

No matter where you are in the world, the moon is never bigger than your thumb.

That staring at the stars was like staring backward in time, since some stars are so far away that their light takes millions of years just to reach us. That we see stars not as they look now, but as they were when dinosaurs roamed the earth.