#planets

For a long time, we've worked on detecting planets with whatever was at hand, making use of existing small telescopes or even amateur telescopes. It's time to move on to the next stage. ↗

— Andrew Gould

#detecting #even #existing #hand #long

Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics. ↗

— Jean M. Auel

#am #archaeology #astronomy #based #basis

It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before. ↗

— Douglas Trumbull

#became #been #before #bulk #doing

His laws changed all of physics and astronomy. His laws made it possible to calculate the mass of the sun and planets. The way it's done is immensely beautiful. If you know the orbital period of any planet, say, Jupiter or the Earth and you know its distance to the Sun; you can calculate the mass of the Sun. Doesn't this sound like magic? We can carry this one step further - if you know the orbital period of one of Jupiter's bright moons, discovered by Galileo in 1609, and you know the distance between Jupiter and that moon, you can calculate the mass of Jupiter. Therefore, if you know the orbital period of the moon around the Earth (it's 27.32 days), and you know the mean distance between the Earth and the moon (it's about 200,039 miles), then you can calculate to a high degree of accuracy the mass of the Earth. … But Newton's laws reach far beyond our solar system. They dictate and explain the motion of stars, binary stars, star clusters, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies. And Newton's laws deserve credit for the 20th century discovery of what we call dark matter. His laws are beautiful. Breathtakingly simple and incredibly powerful at the same time. They explain so much and the range of phenomena they clarify is mind boggling. By bringing together the physics of motion, of interaction between objects and of planetary movements, Newton brought a new kind of order to astronomical measurements, showing how, what had been a jumble of confused observations made through the centuries were all interconnected. ↗

— Walter Lewin

#inspiration #newton #newton-s-laws #physics #planets

So I saw many planets, and they looked just a little bit brighter than they do from Earth. ↗

— Sally Ride

#brighter #earth #i #just #little

The sun and its retinue of planets drift as a group through the vast gulfs of space that separate the stars. ↗

— Barney Oliver

#group #planets #separate #space #stars

As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all, so as to be independent of both these conditions, would be increasingly felt. ↗

— John Desmond Bernal

#atmosphere #both #cold #conditions #containing

To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places. ↗

— Wendell Phillips

#congress #gravitation #hear #kept #law

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#daughters #delight #done #planets #teach

Wonder if there is life on another planet? Let's suppose there is. Suppose further, that only one star in a trillion has a planet that could support life. If that were the case, then there would be at least 100 million planets that harbored life. ↗

— Ben Sweetland

#case #could #further #harbored #least