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.

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.

Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an archaeological dig into the history of the solar system.

Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a 'chorus of worlds' just like ours.

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

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

What planet are you on?

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.

No matter how you measure it, whether you measure the amount of mass or you measure the number of bodies, most of our solar system exists out beyond the orbits of the asteroids. So we could not have claimed to know our own solar system until Voyager had toured the giant planets.

That so many binary or quasi-binary KBOs exist came as a real surprise to the research community.

If you go to planetary science meetings and hear technical talks on Pluto, you will hear experts calling it a planet every day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Before 1995, the only planets we knew about were the planets in our solar system.

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

The first inspiration I ever had was the cosmos, the planetary system.

My biggest love is still planets and stars. If I hadn't become an artist, I'd be an astronomer because I still love it so much.

There is a distinct layer between the Earth and the universe, which is extremely black. Slowly, the entire universe starts to look 3D, like you can fly through it rather than this sphere of blackness overhead. And when you're above the atmosphere, there isn't water vapour in the air to make things foggy.

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

The gas-giant planets in our solar system all have large moons.

I'm not really into sci-fi movies, but I'm into the science of space a lot. I love astronomy and thinking about the nothingness of the everythingness of space.

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