Debra Fischer Quotes

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.

It will be a long time, if ever, before we get to study Earth-like planets orbiting around other stars, so really, the study of Venus and Mars is the best opportunity that we have, and can imagine having anytime in the future, to understand the evolution of Earth-like planets.

A 'serious' scientist in 1992 or 1993 had to admit the possibility that planets were really rare, that most stars might not have planets. We've gone from there to here - where most stars have planets.

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

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.

For many centuries, humans have speculated that there might be planetary systems around other stars and that there could be extraterrestrial life there and even intelligent being. However, those were simply speculations, and now we have evidence for the first part of these ideas.

The mission of NASA's Kepler telescope is to lift the scales from our eyes and reveal to us just how typical our home world is. Kepler operates by measuring the dimming of stars as planets pass ('transit') in front of them. It has found thousands of previously unknown worlds.

We must believe then, that as from hence we see Saturn and Jupiter; if we were in either of the Two, we should discover a great many Worlds which we perceive not; and that the Universe extends so in infinitum.

The bottom line is, like, one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds.

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.

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.

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.

There are other planets besides the Earth and Mars. I'd like to remind you that studying Venus is vital to understanding life elsewhere.

We now know that stars which are abundant in heavy metals are five times more likely to harbor orbiting planets than are stars deficient in metals.

The story seems to be that almost every star has a planetary system... and, also, the definition of 'habitable zone' has expanded. In our system, it used to be that only Mars and Earth were potentially habitable. Now we've got an ocean on Europa... Titan.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

When I was a little kid, we only knew about our nine planets. Since then, we've downgraded Pluto but have discovered that other solar systems and stars are common. So life is probably quite prevalent.

This plucky NASA telescope is able to find planets en masse. If you compare planet hunting to prospecting for gold, then Kepler is equivalent to trading in your trusty pan for a diesel-powered sluice box.

The Egyptians saw the sun and called him Ra, the Sun God. He rode across the sky in his chariot until it was time to sleep. Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise, and poor Ra lost his divinity.

The development of the telescope, together with increased knowledge of things, brought men to see that the earth is not what man had once thought it to be.

It feels great to discover a planet, just like any discovery in science, except that it has more of the feel of exploration - you can go back and look at it. However, I can never visit.

The solar system should be viewed as our backyard, not as some sequence of destinations that we do one at a time.

So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

From the moment of using rocket devices, a great new era will begin in astronomy: the epoch of the more intensive study of the firmament.

My interest in astronomy grew from the play 'Space' that I did, where I had to learn where my character was from. I had to study the stars and figure where everything was and how I got here and all of those things.