Stellar Motion Quotes

Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion.

Look at the stars lighting up the sky: no one of them stays in the same place.

Observe the movements of the stars as if you were running their courses with them, and let your mind constantly dwell on the changes of the elements into each other. Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground.

In the first book I shall describe all the positions of the spheres, along with the motions which I attribute to the Earth, so that the book will contain as it were the general structure of the universe. In the remaining books I relate the motions of the remaining stars, and all the spheres, to the mobility of the Earth, so that it can be thence established how far the motions and appearances of the remaining stars and spheres can be saved, if they are referred to the motions of the Earth.

The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.

Stars don't sit still, they twinkle

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.

There's a large cluster of stars that are orbiting the center of our galaxy. And by measuring the motion of stars, and in particular, their orbits, we can figure out whether or not there's a central black hole.

Astronautics, strictly speaking, will be concerned with voyages to other stars. Remarkably enough, to achieve such feats, we might not even have to leave the earth. It would suffice to accelerate the sun itself to a very high speed and let it drag all its planets with it.

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.

The great spirals, with their enormous radial velocities and insensible proper motions, apparently lie outside our Solar system.

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.

The following passage is one of those cited by Copernicus himself in his preface to De Revolutionibus: "The Syracusan Hicetas, as Theophrastus asserts, holds the view that the heaven, sun, moon, stars, and in short all of the things on high are stationary, and that nothing in the world is in motion except the earth, which by revolving and twisting round its axis with extreme velocity produces all the same results as would be produced if the earth were stationary and the heaven in motion. . . ."

During the winter my attention was attracted to the changes in the stars and planets in the sky.

The principal reason for the universe's poker face is that its constituents are far away. Stars careen through space, and galaxies spin at speeds thousands of times faster than a jet plane. But given their distance, you'd need the patience of Job to notice much change in their appearance or position.

And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall towards the centre of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle (The love that moves the sun and the other stars)

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike

All the stars all the galaxies are in the same spot night after night after night. And Planet Nine, when we see it, will slowly move across the sky.

I believe that there is a love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Stars appear as pin-points of light. They don't twinkle there as they do when we see them from earth because the atmospheric blanket is not there.

From a short-sided view, the whole moving contents of the heavens seemed to them a parcel of stones, earth and other soul-less bodies, though they furnish the sources of the world order.

The great spirals... apparently lie outside our stellar system.

Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere.

More stars in the north are seen not to set, while in the south certain stars are no longer seen to rise.