Experts
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Director, Hayden Planetarium
Recent Activity
An interview about space exploration, Mars, and life on other planets on CBS's Early Show. Watch CBS News Videos Online
October 12, 2009, 10:57 PM
Happy Birthday NASA, NASA's 50th Magazine
NASA's 50th Anniversary Magazine October 2008 Dear NASA, Happy birthday! Perhaps you didn’t know, but we’re the same age. In the first week of October 1958, you were born of the National Aeronautics and Space Act as a civilian space agency, while I was born of my mother in the East Bronx. So the yearlong celebration of our golden anniversaries, which begins the day after we both turn forty-nine, provides me a unique occasion to reflect on our past, present and future. I was three years old when John Glenn first orbited Earth. I was seven when you lost astronauts Grissom, Chaffee, and White in that tragic fire of their Apollo 1 capsule on the launch pad. I was ten when you landed Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon. And I was fourteen when you stopped going to the Moon altogether. Over that time I was excited for you and for America. But the vicarious thrill of the journey, so prevalent in the hearts and minds of others, was absent from my emotions. I was obviously too young to be an astronaut. But I also knew that my skin color was much too dark for you to picture me as part of this epic adventure. Not only that, even though you are a civilian agency, your most celebrated astronauts were military pilots, at a time when war was becoming less and less popular. During the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement was more real to me than it surely was to you. In fact it took a directive from Vice President Johnson in 1963 to force you to hire black engineers at your prestigious Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I found the correspondence in your archives. Do you remember? James Webb, then head of NASA, wrote to German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, who headed the Center and who was the chief engineer of the entire manned space program. The letter boldly and bluntly directs von Braun to address the lack of equal employment opportunity for Negroes in the region, and to collaborate with the area colleges Alabama A&M and Tuskegee Institute to identify, train, and recruit qualified Negro engineers into the NASA Huntsville family. In 1964, you and I had not yet turned six when I saw picketers outside the newly built apartment complex of our choice, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. They were protesting to prevent Negro families, mine included, from moving there. I’m glad their efforts failed. These buildings were called, perhaps prophetically, the Skyview Apartments on whose roof, 22-stories over the Bronx, I would later train my telescope on the universe. My father was active in the Civil Rights movement, working under New York City’s Mayor Lindsay to create job opportunities for youth in the Ghetto—as the inner city was called back then. Year after year, the forces operating against this effort were huge: poor schools, bad teachers, meager resources, abject racism, and assassinated leaders. So while you were celebrating your monthly advances in space exploration from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, I was watching America do all it could to marginalize who I was and what I wanted to become in life. I looked to you for guidance, for a vision statement that I could adopt that would fuel my ambitions. But you weren’t there for me. Of course, I shouldn’t blame you for society’s woes. Your conduct was a symptom of America’s habits not a cause. I knew this. But you should nonetheless know that among my colleagues, I am the only one in my generation who became an astrophysicist in spite of your achievements in space rather than because of them. For my inspiration, I instead turned to libraries, remaindered books on the cosmos from bookstores, my rooftop telescope, and the Hayden Planetarium. After some fits and starts through my years in school, where becoming an astrophysicist seemed at times to be the path of most resistance through an unwelcoming society, I became a professional scientist. I became an astrophysicist. Over the decades that followed you’ve come a long way. Including, most recently, a Presidentially initiated, Congressionally endorsed vision statement that finally gets us back out of low-earth orbit. Whoever does not yet recognize the value of this adventure to our Nation’s future, soon will, as the rest of the developed and developing world passes us by in every measure of technological and economic strength. Not only that, today you look much more like America—from your senior-level managers to your most decorated astronauts. Congratulations. You now belong to the entire citizenry. Examples of this abound, but I especially remember when the public took ownership of the Hubble Telescope, your most beloved unmanned mission. They all spoke loudly back in 2004, ultimately reversing the threat that the Telescope might not be serviced a fourth time, extending its life for another decade. Hubble’s transcendent images of the cosmos had spoken to us all, as did the personal profiles of the Space Shuttle astronauts who deployed and serviced the telescope, and the scientists who benefited from its data stream. Not only that, I’ve even joined the ranks of your most trusted, as I serve dutifully on your prestigious Advisory Council. I came to recognize that when you’re at your best, nothing in this world can inspire the dreams of a Nation the way you can—dreams fueled by a pipeline of ambitious students, eager to become scientists, engineers, and technologists in the service of the greatest quest there ever was. You have come to represent a fundamental part of America’s identity, not only to itself but to the world. So as we both turn forty-nine, and begin our fiftieth trip around the Sun, I want you to know that I feel your pains and share your joys. And I look forward to seeing you back on the Moon. But don’t stop there. Mars beckons, as do destinations beyond. Birthday buddy, even if I have not always been, I am now your humble servant, Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History
July 28, 2009, 1:17 AM
The Pluto Files, Anti-Crap Radio, May 16, 2009
Discussion of Pluto and science communication on Anti-Crap Radio. var s1 = new SWFObject('http://research.amnh.org/users/tyson/media/player.swf','player','400','20','9'); s1.addParam('allowfullscreen','true'); s1.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always'); s1.addParam('flashvars','file=http://research.amnh.org/users/tyson/media/audio/Acr051609DrNeilTysonAndJoanZen.mp3'); s1.write('mediaplayer');
May 16, 2009, 12:00 AM
The Free Lance-Star April 5, 2009 In the face of disaster, optimists tend to be grateful because they easily imagine how much worse things could have been. Count astrophysicists among them. When we hear about earthly problems, many of us think to ourselves, "You have no idea." Worried about something falling on your head as you walk down the street? We've got something better. Thousands of asteroids the size of baseball stadiums—and larger—orbit the sun with trajectories that intersect Earth's path. Eventually, Earth will collide with every one of them—at impact speeds of at least seven miles per second. The smallest of that set are large enough to cause deadly tsunamis and trillions of dollars of property damage. A medium-size asteroid will devastate our culture as it disrupts food chains, transportation systems, the electrical grid, and the overall stability of what we call civilization. The largest among them—the size of mountains—will launch an assault on the tree of life that will extinguish more than half of all land and oceanic species. Worried about a hole in the ozone layer cased by pollutants? How about no ozone layer at all? Not too far away, in a neighboring galaxy, lies a prodigious stellar nursery, birthing stars of all sizes—small ones and large ones. At the top end of this range are stars that die spectacular deaths—exploding their guts at staggering speeds across the galaxy. A particularly deadly subset of these will focus nearly all their explosive energy into a narrow beam that's bright enough to be seen across the entire universe. The beam is so intense with life-hostile UV and X-rays that if it happens to aim at Earth, the leading edge of this radiation will deplete our protective ozone layer entirely. Without this line of atmospheric defense, the radiation that follows will pass straight through the atmosphere, sterilizing Earth's surface. Worried about falling into a hole in the ground? How about a black hole in space? If you fell into one of these, you'd never come out. The very fabric of space and time closes back on itself, preventing all escape. And as you fell—feet-first, let's say—the gravity at your feet would rapidly become much greater than the gravity at your head, forcing your body to stretch beyond comfort—beyond your body's capacity to remain whole. Your body would snap, as your lower half separated from your torso. Each of those two body segments then would snap into two more pieces, and so forth. But it gets worse. During your fall, the fabric of space and time gets narrower, effectively extruding your body parts like toothpaste from a tube. We call this form of death "spaghettification." Worried about a fender bender on the highway? Consider the impending collision between our beloved 100-billion-star Milky Way galaxy and our nearby cousin, the Andromeda Galaxy. These are two beautiful spiral galaxies currently minding their own business, yet they are hurtling toward each other through the vacuum of intergalactic space, with a closing speed of about 400 miles per second. We collide in about 6 or 7 billion years. Stars will not likely hit each other directly—space is too empty for that—but a gravitational free-for-all will ensue, with stars, and whatever planets orbit them, cast hither and yon in the cosmic equivalent of a train wreck. Worried about global warming redrawing Earth's coastlines? How about no coastlines at all? In about 5 billion years, the sun will exhaust its stable supply of hydrogen fuel. In response, its inner regions will collapse, raise the core temperature, and ignite helium as the next fuel source. In the meantime the sun's outer layers will expand prodigiously, engulfing the entire orbits of Mercury and Venus. As the sun continues to grow—as the sun's luminous surface gets closer and closer—Earth will get hotter and hotter. The oceans will come to a rolling boil, evaporate into the atmosphere, and lay bare the ocean floor. Our heated atmosphere will escape into space, as Earth's surface becomes a scorched wasteland. Worried about Earth running out of fuel? The cosmos shares a similar problem. As the universe expands, the concentration of energy within it gets weaker and weaker. Eventually all gas clouds that make stars will have made all the stars they can. All stars, beginning with the most luminous ones, run out of fuel entirely. With nothing to replace them, the stars you see at night begin to blink off—one by one—as the universe becomes cold and dark and desolate. The cosmos will indeed end. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Have a nice day.
April 5, 2009, 10:00 PM
Neil deGrasse Tyson was born and raised in New York City where he was educated in the public schools clear through his graduation from the Bronx High School of Science. Tyson went on to earn his BA in Physics from Harvard and his PhD in Astrophysics from Columbia. He is the first occupant of the Frederick P. Rose Directorship of the Hayden Planetarium. His professional research interests are broad, but include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our Milky Way. Tyson obtains his data from the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as from telescopes in California, New Mexico, Arizona, and in the Andes Mountains of Chile.Tyson is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. His contributions to the public appreciation of the cosmos have been recognized by the International Astronomical Union in their official naming of asteroid "13123 Tyson".
