Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

I refuse to accept Pluto's resignation as a planet.

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.

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

I think when people see Pluto revealed by New Horizons, its satellite system, its complex surface, its atmosphere, I think they'll have a hard time saying 'That's not a planet' because it obviously will be, and I think most people are already coming to that opinion anyway, but I think that's really going to drive it home viscerally.

I think that one of the things that will come out of the New Horizons mission is that the public will take a look, and they won't know what else to call Pluto but a planet - and a pretty exciting one.

The planets. Now footnote, I'm including Pluto in the planets, because I think it's terrible what they did to Pluto. And it's still a planet to me. I grew up with Pluto as a planet, it will always be a planet.

Why did we do that to Pluto? We had it good with Pluto.

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.

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

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

Pluto is the new Mars.

I call Pluto the harbinger.

As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.

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

What the hell happened to Pluto?!

Pluto is not a planet, but I am.

Pluto has a very interesting history, and there is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place.

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

Liquids may have existed on the surface of Pluto in the past.

People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.

There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.

Of course Pluto is a planet: It's massive enough to have its shape controlled by gravity rather than material strength, which is the hallmark of planethood.

Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.

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.