Stellar Mass Quotes

Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song.

What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.

Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole. It's actually not massive enough.

The waves travel with the velocity of light and slightly squeeze and stretch space transverse to the direction of their motion. The first waves we measured came from the collision of two black holes each about 30 times the mass of our sun.

When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star's mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely.

Stars that become supernovae start off at least eight times heavier than our sun. They're so short-lived that, even if they have planets, there is unlikely to be time for life to get started. The surface is 40,000C and, as a result, the colouring will be extremely blue.

Most stars just fuse hydrogen into helium, but larger stars can fuse helium into other elements. Still larger stars, in turn, fuse those elements into slightly bigger ones, and so on.

Estimates are that at least 70 per cent of all stars are accompanied by planets, and since the latter can occur in systems rather than as individuals (think of our own solar system), the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy is of order one trillion.

It's a pity that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.

The universe has told us the most common types of planets are small planets, and our study shows these are exactly the ones that are most likely to be orbiting Alpha Centauri A and B.

As our sensitivity improves, we are finally seeing planets with longer orbital periods, planetary systems that look more like our solar system.

I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.

Black holes destroy any objects that happen to fall victim to their gravitational pull.

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!