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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Just as our solar system has a certain idiosyncratic assortment of planets and moons, different from any neighboring system yet categorically equivalent, so each distinct period of human history might have special qualities and individuals, characteristics and events, yet still be essentially akin beneath the surface to all the others.

When I was a little kid, we only knew about our nine planets. Since then, we've downgraded Pluto but have discovered that other solar systems and stars are common. So life is probably quite prevalent.

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

We're going to understand that there is life on other bodies in the solar system.

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

The cosmic game changed forever in 1992. Before then, logic told us that there had to be other planets besides the nine (if you still count poor Pluto) in our solar system, but until that year, when two astronomers detected faint, telltale radio signals in the constellation Virgo, we had no hard evidence of their existence.

What planet are you on?

Jupiter, Pluto, pick a planet: we can go there. I just got a bit more work to do in the music industry, and we're going to space, baby.

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

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

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

We were very surprised to find out that Pluto is still geologically alive. It has upended our ideas of how planetary geophysics works.

Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles: it snows on the surface; the snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248 year orbit.

I think Pluto has to be considered among the places in the solar system that are possible homes for life.

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

Venus and Mars are our next of kin: they are the two most Earth-like planets that we know about. They're the only two other very Earth-like planets in our solar system, meaning they orbit close to the sun; they have rocky surfaces and thin atmospheres.