Debra Fischer Quotes

Let me mention that not all sun-like stars host planets - perhaps about 30% of them are planet-builders. It's not so easy to form a planet!

It now appears that essentially every star has a planetary system. In the very beginning, we thought at best half.

A 'serious' scientist in 1992 or 1993 had to admit the possibility that planets were really rare, that most stars might not have planets. We've gone from there to here - where most stars have planets.

Data suggest that central black holes might play an important role in adjusting how many stars form in the galaxies they inhabit. For one thing, the energy produced when matter falls into the black hole may heat up the surrounding gas at the center of the galaxy, thus preventing cooling and halting star formation.

We are made of starstuff.

We only recently figured out the origin of our own moon. And we have some idea of how the Sun and Earth formed, but that's only because modern telescopes empower us to see other stars and planets freshly hatched within gas clouds across the galaxy. As for the origin of life itself, the transition from inanimate molecules to what any of us would call life remains one of the great frontiers of biology.

It is unlikely that we will ever see a star being born. Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the very young, but never their actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event. Stars are born inside thick clouds of dust and gas in the spiral arms of the galaxy, so thick that visible light cannot penetrate them.

The mass starts into a million suns; Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst, And second planets issue from the first.

Once you've got the makings of a star, gravity draws leftover gas and dust into a giant swirling disk. The dust continues to stick together, clumping into rocky asteroids, which eventually become orbiting rocky planets. And voila: a solar system!

But one of the coolest things about meteorites is that most were formed four-and-a-half-billion years ago, during the birth of our solar system, when, for reasons not yet known, a cloud of gas and dust was transformed into a sun with circling planets.

We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star. 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 most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

When discs form around stars, there is interaction of angular momentum between disc, planets and parent star, and this interaction affects the rotation of the parent star, and that will affect the lithium abundance.

The cosmos is three times as old as Earth. During most of creation's 14 billion year history, our solar system wasn't around. Nonetheless, the early universe still had the right stuff for life, and contained worlds that were just as suitable for spawning biology and intelligence as our own.

After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life.

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.

Earth took her shining station as a star, In Heaven's dark hall, high up the crowd of worlds.

Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event.

Even to make the first cell possible, stellar space required to be swept of matter, suns must needs be broken up, and planets cool, the agents of geology labour millennium after millennium at the unfinished earth to prepare a material resting-place for the coming guest. Consider all this, and judge if Creation could have a sublimer meaning, or the Human Race possess a more splendid genesis.

The reality is that we know that this universe, that our galaxy, has billions of stars. We know that stars have planets. So the likelihood that there is life somewhere else to me is just absolutely there.

At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars, matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple bodies exist on these incandescent stars.

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

When stars form a planet, they come in a bunch.

Prebiotic chemistry on other worlds is going to be common. Plenty of small rocky planets will have similar chemistry. It's almost a given.

Hubble showed us the marvel and majesty of stars being born.