Arthur C. Clarke Quotes

Very, very slowly, the dwarf remnants of what was once our mighty sun will cool and dim, until it embarks on its final metamorphosis, gradually solidifying into a crystal of extraordinary rigidity. Eventually it will fade out completely, merging quietly into the blackness of space.

The objects that are of moderate energy, like our sun or most of the stars that we see in the night sky with the naked eye, are objects in which relatively moderate energy processes are taking place.

Most stars just fuse hydrogen into helium, but larger stars can fuse helium into other elements. Still larger stars, in turn, fuse those elements into slightly bigger ones, and so on.

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.

Many billions of years will elapse before the smallest, youngest stars complete their nuclear burning and shrink into white dwarfs. But with slow, agonizing finality perpetual night will surely fall.

What do stars do? They shine.

The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today.

When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe.

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.

The whole of the hydrogen on the earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.

We are made out of stardust. The iron in the hemoglobin molecules in the blood in your right hand came from a star that blew up 8 billion years ago. The iron in your left hand came from another star.

An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star's life.

Stars that become supernovae start off at least eight times heavier than our sun. They're so short-lived that, even if they have planets, there is unlikely to be time for life to get started. The surface is 40,000C and, as a result, the colouring will be extremely blue.

What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.

At the extreme temperature occurring in the stars, matter can only survive in its most dissociated states. Only simple bodies exist on these incandescent stars.

Once a star dies, it's gone forever. There are no new stars to take its place. Eventually, there will be no stars, and the universe will turn black. That really will be the end.

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.

There's truth in light. You can tell what elements a star is composed of and the temperature at which it burns by the light it gives off.

Every time four protons are turned into a helium nucleus, two neutrinos are produced. These neutrinos take only two seconds to reach the surface of the Sun and another eight minutes or so to reach the Earth. Thus, neutrinos tell us what happened in the center of the Sun eight minutes ago.

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.

There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there's not a thing you can do about it.

Stars have their moments then they die.