Stellar Formation Quotes

When I grew up as a kid, we didn't know there were any other planets outside of our own solar system. It was widely speculated that planet formation was an incredibly rare event and that it's possible that other planets just don't exist in our galaxy, and it's just this special situation where we happen to have planets around our sun.

We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened - Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course It could be done.

We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock.

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

It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!

If gravity were somewhat stronger or weaker, stars wouldn't exist, and neither would you. And the same can be said of other constants of physics. Several have to be 'just right.'

I like to describe my life as a black hole with a little light out there.

The first stars tremble as if shimmering in green water. Hours must pass before their glimmer hardens into the frozen glitter of diamonds. I shall have a long wait before I witness the soundless frolic of the shooting stars. In the profound darkness of certain nights I have seen the sky streaked with so many trailing sparks that it seemed to me a great gale must be blowing through the outer heavens.

One of the first thoughts I had, when doing early exoplanet research, was that Earth and its many companions seemed very different from the planetary systems we were detecting.

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

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.

It shows you exactly how a star is formed; nothing else can be so pretty! A cluster of vapor, the cream of the milky way, a sort of celestial cheese, churned into light.

If we're thinking about old civilizations, those that formed a long time ago and there were stars and planets around long before Earth even existed, then these are going to be towards the center of the galaxy. That is the place to look if you think there are ancient civilizations that have made beacons or some other way of attracting our attention.

Stars are holes in the sky, they are the light of Heaven coming from the other side.

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 atoms that make up your body were once forged inside stars, and the causes of even the smallest event are virtually infinite and connected with the whole in incomprehensible ways.

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.

His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.

This world was once a fluid haze of light, Till toward the centre set the starry tides, And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast The planets: then the monster, then the man.

Seeing outward is equivalent to looking backward in time because the telescope's mirror is capturing primeval light... galaxies that existed before our time.

Astronomers can look back in time. We can look at things as they used to be. We have an idea there was a Big Bang explosion 13.7 billion years ago. We have a story of how galaxies and stars were made. It's an amazing story.

The great spirals... apparently lie outside our stellar system.

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.

We still don't know for sure what the trigger was, but since we've discovered meteorites with supernova dust, we do know that a violent explosion rocked our cosmic neighborhood at the time of our birth, and it's quite possible that without it, our stable, stately solar system would never exist at all.