Heinz R. Pagels Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

As the plow pushes through a parking lot of light fluffy snow, the snow clumps together in bigger and bigger chunks. Out in space, pressure hitting a gas cloud has a similar effect, except, instead of snowballs, you get stars!

All the atoms we are made of are forged from hydrogen in stars that died and exploded before our solar system formed. So if you are romantic, you can say we are literally stardust. If you are less romantic, you can say we're the nuclear waste from fuel that makes stars shine.

We are all made up of stars and all of us are billions of years old - that's what I believe, at least.

Even your chin is made up of exploded stars.

Big Bang gave us hydrogen and helium. We couldn't make people out of hydrogen and helium. So we're made out of exploding stars.

You could think of the galaxy as a sort of stove with lots of pots on it, and the pots are the interstellar medium, like a chicken broth getting stronger with every reduction. Every time a supernova goes off and sends its heavy elements out into the interstellar medium, we cook up a stew that's better and better for solar systems and life.

We forget how recently astronomers figured out what the stars are made of, what makes them shine, how distant they are, how they are born, and whether they remain immutable or evolve and die.

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

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

I create stars.

Whether a star has planetary companions or not is a condition of its birth. Those with a larger initial allotment of metals have an advantage over those without.

The early universe was a dusty place, and the UV radiation from the hot, young black holes and stars would get enshrouded by dust, re-radiated, and scattered into red wavelengths like infra-red, causing these objects to remain obscured.

We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.

When we look out into space, we are looking into our own origins, because we are truly children of the stars.

I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.

Every star was once darker than the night, before it awoke.

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.

Humans are made from nuclear ash of dead stars

This entire process of stellar evolution is by natural process alone. We do not have to invoke Divine intervention at any stage in the history of the life-cycle of the stars that we observe.