So there was a camera attached to the telescope. And with it Hubble photographs stars at the far reaches of the Milky Way. At that time the only known galaxy in the universe. On 6th October 1923 Hubble took a photograph that must rank as one of the most significant photographs ever taken. This photograph demonstrated for the first time just how vast the universe truly is. Michael Mosley, The Story of Science, BBC 2010
It has been estimated that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in all the world. Jim Al-Khalili, Everything & Nothing: Everything, BBC 2011
One of the great unsung heroes of science. She worked at the Harvard College Observatory. And her name was Henrietta Leavitt. Leavitt’s job was to count and catalogue the stars. ibid.
The first stars ignited the universe into what must have been the most amazing firework. The universe went from the dark ages to an age of splendour when the first stars began to illuminate the gas in majestic fashion. Carlos Frenk, University of Durham
Every galaxy Vera [Rubin] looked at gave her the same seemingly crazy results: all the stars all the way to the edge of the galaxies were moving at the same speed, completely different from the way the solar system works. Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman s1e8: Beyond the Darkness, Science 2010
In just over five years Saul [Perlmutter] and his team spot thirty-eight different stars in thirty different galaxies called supernova. ibid.
Until recently we believed that the space between the stars and planets was empty – a vacuum. We now know it is teeming with charged particles. We see glowing electric filaments spanning millions of light years. Thunderbolts of the Gods, Wallace Thornhill, PSTV 2012
And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something. Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Stars and shadows ain’t good to see by. ibid.
All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster. Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
Telescopes are in some ways like time machines. They reveal galaxies so far away that their light has taken billions of years to reach us. We in astronomy have an advantage in studying the universe, in that we can actually see the past.
We owe our existence to stars, because they make the atoms of which we are formed. So if you are romantic you can say we are literally star-stuff. If you’re less romantic you can say we’re the nuclear waste from the fuel that makes stars shine.
We’ve made so many advances in our understanding. A few centuries ago, the pioneer navigators learnt the size and shape of our Earth, and the layout of the continents. We are now just learning the dimensions and ingredients of our entire cosmos, and can at last make some sense of our cosmic habitat. Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal
Two stars: the space telescope will distinguish them clearly. Horizon: The Sharpest Show of the Universe, BBC 1990
Woosley worked out that if a star was to grow to an enormous size – what he called a massive star – then the whole cycle of life and death would be accelerated. A massive star would burn up all its fuel so quickly that it lived a fraction of a star’s normal life. It means these massive stars would die while still very young ... It was given the name hypernova. Horizon: The Death Star, BBC 2001
It’s the greatest engineering challenge we have yet faced. To build a machine that will make a star on Earth. Horizon: Can We Make a Star on Earth? BBC 2008
Black holes are the most terrifying places in the universe. Created when a giant star dies, at their hearts is a point of infinite gravity so powerful nothing can escape it, not even light. Horizon: What is Reality? BBC 2011
In the beginning – the universe was a bit of a let-down really. The real moment of creation came a hundred million years later – the Cosmic Dawn. It’s the moment the first stars were born. The moment that lit up the universe. Horizon: Cosmic Dawn: The Real Moment of Creation, BBC 2015
The Dark Ages are the last great frontier in our cosmic history. ibid.
Stefan’s [Keller] star ... from only the second generation of stars ever made. ibid.
Volker’s [Bromm] model has given us an image of these first stars. ibid.
Their huge size ... They burnt through their fuel incredibly quickly ... A hypernova: the biggest explosion ever in the universe. ibid.
This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments? Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The cores of these massive stars implode – actually implode – in less than a second from something about the size of the Earth down to something that’s probably the size of a small city. And they don’t stop there. They continue imploding all the way down to a point. Professor Douglas Leonard, San Diego State University
When a star a hundred times heavier than our Sun switches off it goes with a bang. While we see the outward explosion as a supernova, this masks the inward implosion. The core is collapsing into the most dangerous object in the universe; the density becomes so great in the centre that Gravity sucks in Time and Space itself. Universe: Stars
The same nuclear reactions that takes place in a hydrogen bomb – converting hydrogen into helium – produces the energy that causes stars to shine. ibid.
A globular cluster usually conceals some mysterious strangers: large blue stars much younger than the small dim stars surrounding them. These unexpected heavenly bodies are known as blue stragglers. The Universe s1e10: Life and Death of a Star, History 2007
Red Dwarfs: they can be as little as one-tenth the mass of the sun, with surface temperatures thousands of degrees cooler. Red Dwarfs are the most common type of star in the universe. ibid.
Scientists are convinced that supernovas are much more significant than spectacular mere light shows. It is thought they are in fact the source of all the heavy elements that make up everything around us. ibid.
A normal supernova arises from the explosion of a star ten times more massive than our sun. Incredibly, Supernova 2006 GY as astronomers have dubbed it seems to have signalled the death of a star 150 or even 200 times more massive – and that’s about as massive as a star can get. ibid.
They are cosmic killers. Spectacular detonations. That for an instant out-shine a whole galaxy. Out of this exceptional cosmic catastrophe comes creation ... Supernovas: the sensational death of stars produce the biggest blasts in the universe. The Universe s2e9: Supernovas
The sky is filled with real-life death stars. Some are dangerously close to our planet. The Universe s4e1: Death Stars
WR104: and its destructive force could be targeting us … just one of millions of massive death stars in the universe. ibid.
The biggest explosion in the known universe: a gamma-ray burst. ibid.
A supernova: an immense burst of radiation that briefly outshines a galaxy. ibid.
Among the swirling dust and gas in the arms of the Milky Way stars flash into existence not alone but in clusters held together by the force of gravity. The Universe s4e7: The Search for Cosmic Clusters
Stars in clusters are many billions of miles apart. ibid.
Einstein’s theory predicts a class of objects with such intense gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape their grasp. He called them dark stars. But he didn’t believe they really existed. As it turned out his theory was right. There is a kind of star that grows so heavy that it collapses under its own weight. The mass of many suns is sucked down to a tiny single point. Unfolding Universe, 2002
The supermassive black hole is three million times the weight of the sun squeezed smaller than a speck of dust. But this tiny object is one of the most veracious predators in the universe: it eats stars. ibid.
When massive stars ten times heavier than our sun die gravity crushes them creating a huge explosion. A supernova. But some stars are even bigger than that. These supermassive stars weigh one hundred times more than our sun, and have one hundred times our gravity. When one of these stars dies it sets off the biggest explosion in the universe: a hypernova. And this is the birth of a black hole. How the Universe Works s1e2: Black Holes, Discovery 2010