Stellar Dynamics Quotes

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.

'Animal Kingdom' is a significant comet, and it's cast a tail. It's very hard to see anything post that happening without that.

The key to proving that there's a black hole is showing that there's a tremendous amount of mass in a very small volume. And you can do that with the motions of stars. The way the star moves around the center of the galaxy is very much like the way the planets orbit the sun.

The first stars tremble as if shimmering in green water. Hours must pass before their glimmer hardens into the frozen glitter of diamonds. I shall have a long wait before I witness the soundless frolic of the shooting stars. In the profound darkness of certain nights I have seen the sky streaked with so many trailing sparks that it seemed to me a great gale must be blowing through the outer heavens.

This entire process of stellar evolution is by natural process alone. We do not have to invoke Divine intervention at any stage in the history of the life-cycle of the stars that we observe.

I am watching the stars, admiring their complex trajectories through space and time. I am trying to give a name to the force that set them in motion.

You know, there was a time, just before I started to study physical science, when astronomers thought that systems such as we have here in the solar system required a rare triple collision of stars.

Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a distance one upon another, but this action is so slight at great distances that their trajectories are rectilineal; nevertheless, from time to time, two of them may come near enough together to be deviated from their course, like a comet that passed too close to Jupiter. In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.

All of the stars rotate, have orbits around the center of the galaxy, and most of them go around the center of the galaxy in nearly circular orbits. They vary a little bit from circular, but they're predominantly circular.

I'm interested in finding whether or not there is a really massive, what we like to call 'super massive' black hole at the center of our galaxy. And the reason this is interesting is that it gives us an opportunity to prove whether or not these exotic objects really exist.

When I was in my teens, Yehudi Menuhin, who was at work on his project 'The Music of Man,' introduced me to the great astronomer Carl Sagan. It was Sagan who first opened my eyes to the magnitude of the universe, and essentially to the notion of 'music of the spheres.'

Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.

Nothing comes out more clearly in astronomical observations than the immense activity of the universe.

Our galaxy's pretty ordinary, garden-variety. So if we believe our galaxy has a super massive black hole, that tells us that most, if not all, galaxies host such a black hole at their centers.

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.

Deep beneath the surface of the Sun, enormous forces were gathering. At any moment, the energies of a million hydrogen bombs might burst forth in the awesome explosion.... Climbing at millions of miles per hour, an invisible fireball many times the size of Earth would leap from the Sun and head out across space.

For your own safety, do not ever tell an astrophysicist, I hope all your stars are twinkling.

It is sound judgment to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star.

I was good at math, math was my thing - but I was not nearly good enough to be an astrophysicist. I was way outta my league. I realized this very quickly.

As an astronomer, I get to ignore the details of the things that we don't understand. There's a lot of work that we can do on scales that we do understand, and there is actually a finite size that I can associate with a super massive black hole.

The question that I started off with was, I thought, very simple. It was just 'Is there a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way?' But one of the things I love about science is that you always end up with new questions.

I'm an astrophysicist and a professor, so my day job involves manipulating intractable numbers that characterize our universe.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run