Richard Preston Quotes

When we look out into space, we're looking back in time; the light from a galaxy a billion light-years away, for instance, will take a billion years to reach us. It's an amazing thing. The history is there for us to see. It's not mushed up like the geologic record of Earth. You can just see it exactly as it was.

Great telescopes like the Kecks allow us to explore the River of Time back toward its source.

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

Pure science - this vision of the universe as 15 billion light years across - I am bedazzled and awed by it.

The universe is a great mystery.

Nature teaches us that tens of billions of light years may have passed, and life in all of its expressions has always been subjected to an incredible combination of matter and radiation.

I dreamt of being an astronomer; I had a series of 'How and Why' books on the planets and the stars. At that stage, there were only 14 galaxies; now there are multiverses, dark matter, the nano-microscopic world of the interior of atomic structure.

The origin of galaxies is one of the fundamental questions of astronomy, and that's what I've been studying.

The Kecks will allow us, like no other telescope in history, to view the evolving universe that gave us birth.

Every field of astrophysics - whether it's our local neighborhood of planets, nearby stars and their attendant planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, out to the edge of the universe - every field has questions that are awaiting the power of Hubble.

Hubble has established for the first time that the distant universe looks different from the nearby universe.

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

I have looked further into space than ever human being did before me. I have observed stars of which the light, it can be proved, must take two million years to reach the earth.

We would look up at the night sky together, and although Stephen wasn't actually very good at detecting constellations, he would tell me about the expanding universe and the possibility of it contracting again and describe a star collapsing in on itself to form a black hole in a way that was quite easy to understand.

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.

We really have only been observing Neptune with big telescopes since shortly before 1989.

We are now able to put our minds in other places in the universe with the use of telescopes. That is very exciting.

With COBE, we can see things before the lights came on. While we probably will not rewrite the book of cosmology with this mission, we will write another chapter.

We were looking almost one-tenth of the way to the edge of the universe. We're planning to use the facilities we have to make improvements by another factor of 10... a strain sensitivity that is 10 times smaller. This means looking 10 times further out into the universe.

The Hubble Telescope can see the farthest galaxies. The Webb Telescope will see the farthest stars.

It's quite likely that planets and solar systems like ours could be forming in other galaxies in great numbers.

There is no limit to what astrophysicists can do. We can be very curious.

No one planet can tell us everything about the universe, but Neptune seems to hold more than its share of information about the formation of our own solar system - as well as the solar systems beyond.

Space is really domain expansion.

There are amateurs who have seen that one of Uranus' poles is brighter than the other, or who have seen cloud formations on the planet. For all we know, interesting things are happening there all the time.