Dimitar Sasselov Quotes

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.

Diminutive worlds are more likely to be rocky, and lapped by oceans and atmospheres. In the vernacular of 'Star Trek,' these would be M-class planets: life-friendly oases where biology could begin and bumpy-faced Klingons might exist.

Super-Earths are how we call a family of planets... up to two times larger and about ten times more massive than the Earth.

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

My field is called planetary science.

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

There's planets, life in the universe. You don't talk about that in high school - or maybe I skipped class that day.

With 'Extinction Machine,' I wanted to start some conversations about whether we're alone in the universe and what that might mean.

The Moon and Mars were the two most likely candidates for life in the solar system; what exists beyond our solar system is mere guesswork.

If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.

The smaller the planets are, they are, other things being equal, of so much the greater density; for so the powers of gravity on their several surfaces come nearer to equality. They are likewise, other things being equal, of the greater density, as they are nearer to the sun.

I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.

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.

Stars, of course, are too hot to support life, so wherever life might exist in the universe, it has to be on planets or moons that are warmed, but not incinerated, by the stars they travel around.

The universe is large and old, and the ingredients for life as we know it are everywhere, so there's no reason to think that Earth would be unique in that regard. Whether of not the life became intelligent is a different question, and we'll see if we find that.

When we discover New Earth - a planet we could call home - the question of the 'plurality of worlds' will come front and center, reminding us yet again that we are not the center of the universe.

There's life all over this universe, but the only life in the solar system is on earth, and in the whole universe we are the only men.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life.

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!

If we do discover more than one type of life on Earth, we can be fairly certain that the universe is teeming with it, for it would be inconceivable that life started twice here but never on all the other earth-like planets.

Well, Well, Well, its certainly a compelling provocative exciting delicious to think about idea, smart people say the universe is so big there must be something statistically it could be likely there could be something happening on some other world.

How can the human race be, like, the only living form in the universe? There have to be other life forms out there. I believe it.

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.

Naturally, we think that finding another Earth-like planet is identifying a site that's at least friendly here for the evolution of life. The primary goal of the Kepler mission is to statistically assess the occurrence of these small terrestrial worlds.

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