Quotes About Space

In our own solar system, for example, everything that is not the Sun adds up to less than one fifth of one percent of the Sun's mass.

Merlin prefers to think of space as the regions between all the particles of all the atoms of the universe.

Can space exist in the absence of matter, if matter defines the edge of space?" Merlin

The actual recipe for the asteroid belt? Take a mere 2.5 percent of the Moon's mass (itself, just 1/81 the mass of Earth), crush it into thousands of assorted pieces, but make sure that three-quarters of the mass is contained in just four asteroids. Then spread them all across a 100-million-mile-wide belt that tracks along a 1.5-billion-mile path around the Sun.

If a particle can fall into a black hole, it can come out of a white hole.

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

So what is the stuff? Nobody knows. The closest anybody has come is to presume dark energy is a quantum effect—where the vacuum of space, instead of being empty, actually seethes with particles and their antimatter counterparts. They pop in and out of existence in pairs, and don't last long enough to be measured.

If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don't know. Maybe there's nothing the matter with the matter, and it's the gravity we don't understand.

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

twenty-four astronauts hail from the swing state of Ohio—more than from any other state—including John Glenn (America's first to orbit Earth) and Neil Armstrong (the world's first to walk on the Moon).

helium became the first and only element in the chemist's Periodic Table to be discovered someplace other than Earth. Okay

going through a wormhole or (as we shall see) by going around a cosmic string.

If you travel fast, several weird things happen. One is that your inner time clock will appear to tick more slowly, as seen by all those who observe you. Your time "dilates.

Al principio, era la física. La

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.

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.

Take America's Global Positioning System, GPS—two dozen satellites in orbit at about 12,500 miles above Earth, more than fifty times higher than ordinary low-Earth-orbit satellites

El físico teórico estadounidense del siglo XX John Archibald Wheeler lo expresó de mejor forma, resumiendo el concepto de Einstein como: "La materia le dice al espacio cómo curvarse; el espacio la dice a la materia cómo moverse".4

We went to the moon, looking to discover it, and we looked back and we discovered Earth for the first time.

The Cosmic Perspective reminds us that in space, where there is no air, a flag will not wave. An indication that perhaps flag-waving and space exploration do not mix.

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.

matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.