Quotes About Astronomy

Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?

My field is called planetary science.

The universe is very big - there's about 100,000 million galaxies in the universe, so that means an awful lot of stars. And some of them, I'm pretty certain, will have planets where there was life, is life, or maybe will be life. I don't believe we're alone.

I like the planets because they are real places that you can go to and send machines to. Faraway astronomy - galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy - is really cool stuff, but to me, it's about destinations.

I'm an avid watcher of the Nat Geo channel, where I watch shows about how the planets are formed, and shows about moons, quasars, black holes.

It now seems logical that all the stars, like our own sun, must have formed with a system of planets around them.

55 Cancri is extraordinarily rich in heavy elements and extraordinarily efficient at making planets - much more so than our sun - and those elements are the very ones you need to make planets that aren't just gas giants.

There may be hundreds of small seed planets - or planetesimals - which grow in the disk of matter around a star.

Ultimately, what we're looking for in the long run is to find other Earth-like planets.

We now know that stars which are abundant in heavy metals are five times more likely to harbor orbiting planets than are stars deficient in metals.

Kepler's blown the lid off everything we know about extra-solar planets.

My biggest love is still planets and stars. If I hadn't become an artist, I'd be an astronomer because I still love it so much.

Planets' orbits are elliptical. It's a very pleasing shape.

Back before the Kuiper Belt was discovered, Pluto did look like a misfit that didn't belong with either the terrestrials or the giant planets.

Pluto is as far across as Manhattan to Miami, but its atmosphere is bigger than the Earth's.

The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.

Pluto's orbit is so elongated that it crosses the orbit of another planet. Now that's... you've got no business doing that if you want to call yourself a planet. Come on, now! There's something especially transgressive about that.

Jocelyn Bell joined the project as a graduate student in 1965, helping as a member of the construction team and then analysing the paper charts of the sky survey.

The thing about telescopes is that the mirror is the main component. Once that's built, you don't need to build new ones; you just need to swap out the instruments. There's nothing wrong with Hubble's mirror.

I've always liked Saturn. But I also have some sympathy for Pluto because I heard it's been downgraded from a planet, and I think it should remain a planet. Once you've given something planetary status it's kind of mean to take it away.

It's possible to gather light that's older than our solar system.

Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.

The centre of the system of the world is immovable.

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