Jocelyn Bell Burnell Quotes

It was only about sixty years ago that the expansion of the universe was first observed.

Observations indicate that the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. It will expand forever, getting emptier and darker.

I don't know why anyone would want to study the expansion of the universe.

The universe is expanding, and every second that you're alive, the universe is bigger than it was a second before. There's nothing in front of us, exactly, other than the future, and there's no space for the size, the density of the universe to go. Because it's expanding at every point simultaneously.

The Big Bang theory is the idea that if we go back early enough in the history of the universe - and we can do this, of course, by looking at starlight coming to us from billions of years ago - we will see a very hot and dense period where the universe was much smaller, denser, and hotter.

Until the 1990s, there were few reliable observations about movement at the scale of the entire universe, which is the only scale dark energy effects. So dark energy could not be seen until we could measure things very, very far away.

We know that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, which means a number called the cosmological constant must be positive.

They've discovered that, where all the other galaxies are moving in one direction, ours is going in another. Now, the Big Bang theory says that we're all moving outward.

They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic.

The age of the universe is not just 'a guess', but rather it is a carefully measured number that is now known to a high degree of accuracy.

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

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

The predominant theory of the origin of the universe is the Big Bang.

I can feel the universe expanding and making things be further apart.

Astronomers still can't decide what the shape of our universe is. Is it closed and finite, which is to say, is there a countable tally of all the galaxies that exist, even beyond the ones we can see? Or is it infinite? The latter possibility is still on the table.

I'm baffled all the time. We don't know what's driving 96% of the universe. Everybody you know and love and heard of and think about and see in the night sky through a telescope: four percent of the universe.

The universe starts off with the Big Bang theory, and the first thing that emerged from the Big Bang is essentially hydrogen and then helium. And that's what combusts in stars. Finally, stars implode, and they build heavier elements out of that. And those heavier elements are reconstituted in the heart of other stars, eventually.

We look at distant exploding stars called supernovae, and we've developed techniques to measure how far away they are and how fast they're moving away from us.

We've known for a long time that the universe is expanding. But about 15 years ago, my colleagues and I discovered that it is expanding faster and faster. That is, the universe is accelerating, and that was not expected, but it is now attributed to this mysterious stuff called dark energy which seems to make up about 70 percent of the universe.

First of all, the Big Bang wasn't very big. Second of all, there was no bang. Third, Big Bang Theory doesn't tell you what banged, when it banged, how it banged. It just said it did bang. So the Big Bang theory in some sense is a total misnomer.

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up, the Universe will end in ice.

Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed, because dark energy has no effect on daily life, or even inside our solar system.

One of the great challenges of modern cosmology is to discover what the geometry of the universe really is.

According to the standard model billions of years ago some little quantum fluctuation, perhaps a slightly lower density of matter, maybe right where we're sitting right now, caused our galaxy to start collapsing around here.

There are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy.