So if you moved it to where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate the ice and it would grow a tail. So Pluto is not only the littlest planet, all right, that alone shouldn't hurt it, but more than half of its volume is ice. Space Astrophysicist Chronicles The Battle Over Pluto There he was on the screen, but he was really with you in the living room.' 'His style was very conversational and fireside-chatty. It was 'proof that a scientist can communicate with the public in a manner that was very different from a professor in front of a classroom or pontificating from up on high,' Tyson tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. Tyson was entering graduate school in astrophysics at the time and remembers watching Carl Sagan host the original Cosmos. It's an update of the influential 1980 PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Journey. This spring, Tyson hosts a new TV series called Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey. He's hosted a four-part series on Nova and appeared everywhere from The Tonight Show to The Daily Show to Wait Wait. Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in New York, is a prolific writer and frequently cited authority on astronomy in the popular media.

But if you ask Neil deGrasse Tyson how he became an astrophysicist he says: 'I think the universe called me. When it comes to 'callings' we usually think of people who feel drawn to religious career paths. It's an update of the influential 1980 PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Journey, hosted by Carl Sagan. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts a new TV series called Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey.

Cosmos a personal journey