Alan Stern Quotes

Back before the Kuiper Belt was discovered, Pluto did look like a misfit that didn't belong with either the terrestrials or the giant planets.

Pluto and its brethren are the most populous class of planets in our solar system.

The Kuiper Belt is the largest mapped structure in our planetary system, three times as big as all the territory from the sun out to Neptune's orbit.

One of the implications of the discovery of the Kuiper Belt and its many small planets is that many scientists now think of the solar system as having not two but three zones.

There are lots of really interesting little planets out there in the Kuiper Belt, but Pluto's the only one that's got all the cool attributes.

The Kuiper belt region, which I call the third zone because it lies beyond the rocky terrestrial planets and beyond the giant planets, is a bizarre frontier.

You could not have predicted the amazing discoveries at Pluto, even though we have been to a couple of objects in the solar system that were at least a little analogous to Pluto.

I actually started my career in planetary science with a master's thesis on Pluto.

Certainly the history of astronomy shows that every time we thought we were special, we were wrong.

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.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

Moreover, since the sun remains stationary, whatever appears as a motion of the sun is really due rather to the motion of the earth.

All the nine-planet people out there: Get over it. There's eight.

It's interesting - Pluto's almost a brand unto itself. It's the farthest. It's the most diminutive of the classical planets. It's been maligned by astronomers. It's always the one with all the question marks in the back of the textbook in the table. I think children identify with it because it's smaller, kind of cute.

The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.

Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?

I'm the one who originally coined the term 'dwarf planet,' back in the nineteen-nineties.

Most of the solar system resides beyond the orbits of the asteroids. There is more to learn there about general planetary processes than on Mars.

Hubble is the most important telescope in history after Galileo's first telescope.

I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.

There are amateurs who have seen that one of Uranus' poles is brighter than the other, or who have seen cloud formations on the planet. For all we know, interesting things are happening there all the time.

If you put Earth out beyond Neptune, you wouldn't be able to call it a planet because it couldn't clear its zone.

In the mind of the public, the word 'planet' carries a significance lacking in other words used to describe planetary bodies... many members of the public assume that alleged 'non-planets' cease to be interesting enough to warrant scientific exploration.

We're going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.

As our sensitivity improves, we are finally seeing planets with longer orbital periods, planetary systems that look more like our solar system.