49 Fun Facts About Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Which film's night sky did its director redo for a re-release after Tyson said the stars were wrong?

Titanic. Tyson emailed James Cameron that Rose's stars were wrong for the North Atlantic in April 1912, so Cameron asked him for the right sky and put it in the 2012 3D release.

Which institution did Tyson become director of in 1996?

The Hayden Planetarium. Tyson first walked into its sky theater at age nine and decided on astrophysics; he came back as a staff scientist in 1994 and was running it two years later.

Which animated-comedy creator was an executive producer of Tyson's 2014 Cosmos series?

Seth MacFarlane. The Family Guy creator's backing was instrumental in landing the science documentary on Fox, where its thirteen episodes ran in prime time.

What is the name of the weekly podcast Tyson began hosting in 2009?

StarTalk. It started as a radio pilot funded by the National Science Foundation, for which Tyson recruited stand-up comedians as co-hosts to reach people who thought they didn't like science.

Which rapper's flat-Earth tweets did Tyson rebut point by point in 2016?

B.o.B. The rapper answered with a track calling Tyson out by name, so Tyson's nephew Stephen recorded a reply, 'Flat to Fact', which the astrophysicist shared with his followers.

Which New York high school did Tyson graduate from in 1976?

The Bronx High School of Science. While still a pupil, at fifteen, he was invited to give his first astronomy lecture, to an extension class at the City University of New York.

Which animated film series gave Tyson a cameo as a weasel astronomer named Neil deBuck Weasel?

Ice Age. In Collision Course (2016) his character exists only inside the mind of Buck, the weasel who leads the herd's mission to fend off an asteroid.

Which famous astronomer personally tried to recruit the teenage Tyson to Cornell University?

Carl Sagan invited the 17-year-old to Ithaca for a day, then wrote down his home phone number in case snow stopped the bus and Tyson needed a bed for the night.

Where did Tyson earn his bachelor's degree in physics in 1980?

Harvard. He picked it over Cornell, even though a famous astronomer there had answered his application with a personal letter and a day's tour of the campus.

At which university was Tyson's first doctoral committee dissolved, ending his PhD attempt there?

University of Texas at Austin. He earned a master's there in 1983 but admits he should have spent more time in the lab; his advisers dissolved his committee, in effect flunking him.

From which university did Tyson receive his PhD in 1991?

Columbia. It gave him a second chance after his first doctoral attempt collapsed, and his thesis there traced the chemistry of stars in the Milky Way's central bulge.

Tyson's $210 million rebuild project opened in 2000 as which landmark?

The Rose Center for Earth and Space. Tyson spent three years as the rebuild's project scientist and, while it was going up, founded the museum's Department of Astrophysics.

Which magazine carried Tyson's monthly "Universe" column from 1995 to 2005?

Natural History. The best of those essays were later gathered into Death by Black Hole, which became a New York Times bestseller.

Under what pen name did Tyson answer readers' questions in StarDate magazine?

Merlin. The column's answers filled two books, and in 2024 Tyson brought the character back for an updated edition of the first, Merlin's Tour of the Universe.

What did Tyson name the days when the setting sun lines up with New York's cross streets?

Manhattanhenge. Tyson joked that future archaeologists digging up the street grid would assume it had astronomical meaning, as we do with Stonehenge, where the solstice sun lines up with the stones.

Which president named Tyson to two federal commissions, one on aerospace and one dubbed 'Moon, Mars, and Beyond'?

George W. Bush. The second panel worked out how to carry out his new space-exploration policy, and soon afterwards NASA gave Tyson the highest award it can give someone outside government.

Which PBS programme did Tyson host from 2006 to 2011?

NOVA ScienceNow. Tyson took over the fast-paced magazine show from its first host, Robert Krulwich, doubled as its executive editor, and handed over to tech writer David Pogue.

Which world did Tyson's exhibits famously decline to count among the planets?

Pluto. His display grouped it with other small icy bodies instead of the planets, and Tyson says the hate mail that followed came largely from children.

Which body's 2006 vote on planets backed the call Tyson's exhibits had already made?

International Astronomical Union. Its members voted in Prague that a planet must have cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, six years after Tyson's display opened.

In which animated series did Tyson voice a pet pig that suddenly turns into a genius?

Gravity Falls. In a 2014 episode the pig Waddles eats a mysterious mushroom and becomes smart, and the clever version of him speaks in Tyson's voice.

Which Cosmos season did Tyson return to host in 2020?

Cosmos: Possible Worlds. It was due in March 2019, but its networks pulled it while they investigated misconduct allegations against Tyson, and it reached the screen a year later.

Which network launched Tyson's late-night celebrity talk show in April 2015?

On it he interviews pop-culture celebrities about their experiences with science.

Tyson says nonbelievers keep claiming him as one of their own; which label did he tell Big Think fits best?

Agnostic. He said he rewrote his own online biography after editors kept calling him an atheist, settling on 'widely claimed by atheists, is actually an agnostic'.

Which academic major did Tyson say 'can really mess you up' on a 2014 episode of the Nerdist podcast?

Philosophy. He argued that asking deep questions is a pointless delay when a whole world of unknowns is waiting, and one magazine column answered by calling him a philistine.

How much of each U.S. tax dollar did Tyson tell the Senate that NASA's budget represents?

Half a penny. He told senators that doubling it to a full penny could transform the country, and the line inspired the Penny4NASA campaign to lobby for exactly that.

Which comedy host's 2007 book jokingly called Tyson 'an absolute monster'?

Stephen Colbert. His book I Am America (And So Can You!) grants that most scientists are decent people, then singles out Tyson, a regular and favourite guest on The Colbert Report.

Living four blocks from the World Trade Center on 9/11, what did Tyson fetch before going back out to the street?

His camcorder. Tyson filmed the burning towers from the street, later walked his family three miles north to safety, and wrote an email account of the day that was forwarded far and wide.

In which sci-fi series did Tyson appear as himself alongside Bill Nye in the episode "Brain Storm"?

Stargate Atlantis. He and Bill Nye play themselves at a landmark scientific presentation, where a rival's device that promises to cure global warming refuses to shut off.

In which comic series did Tyson appear in 2012, helping Superman locate his home planet's star?

Action Comics. In issue #14 Tyson helps the Man of Steel find Krypton beside the red dwarf LHS 2520 in Corvus, the Crow, a neat match for Clark Kent's school team, the Smallville Crows.

Which physicist gives his name to the science-communication medal Tyson received at the 2017 Starmus festival?

Stephen Hawking. The medal carries his portrait, drawn by the first spacewalker, Alexei Leonov, with Brian May's guitar on the reverse; Tyson took the 2017 prize for science writing.

Which movie-nitpicking YouTube channel had Tyson co-review Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian?

CinemaSins. Its 'Everything Wrong With' videos count a film's mistakes one by one, and Tyson sat in to tally the scientific ones, starting with Gravity in June 2014.

On which rapper's 2017 album Everybody does Tyson voice God?

Logic. Tyson's God turns up in minutes-long spoken interludes, counselling a man named Atom who has just died in a car accident and arrived in heaven.

Which metal band's 2016 album The Stage features a Tyson monologue on the track "Exist"?

Avenged Sevenfold. Tyson wrote the monologue himself; it closes 'Exist', a 15-minute piece the band built as a heavy-metal version of the Big Bang.

Which sitcom's final-season opener, 'The Conjugal Configuration', featured Tyson and Bill Nye as themselves?

The Big Bang Theory. Raj picks a Twitter fight with Tyson, then loses his nerve when the astrophysicist rings him up; Tyson's next call is to Bill Nye.

Tyson's daughter Miranda is named after a moon of which planet?

Uranus. Gerard Kuiper named the moon in 1948 after the daughter in Shakespeare's The Tempest, keeping to the custom of naming that planet's moons from Shakespeare and Pope.

What does Tyson collect, a hobby profiled in a specialist magazine in 2000 and again in 2005?

Wine. Wine Spectator headlined its profile 'Star Collector', and a later interview had him speculating playfully about the future of wine in space and on other planets.

What honour did People magazine give Tyson in 2000?

Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive. People handed out the title in its 'Sexiest Man Alive' issue of November 2000, the same month an asteroid was officially named 13123 Tyson.

What kind of creature is Indirana tysoni, named after Tyson in 2016?

A leaping frog. It lives in the Western Ghats of southern India, where its tadpoles stay out of the water and scramble over wet mossy rocks on strong tails and early hind legs.

Which of Tyson's books earned a 2018 Grammy nomination for Best Spoken Word Album?

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. The nomination put Tyson up against Bruce Springsteen and Bernie Sanders, and all three lost to the late Carrie Fisher's The Princess Diarist.

Which National Academy of Sciences honour did Tyson receive in 2015?

Public Welfare Medal. The Academy's most prestigious honour went to Tyson for what it called his extraordinary role in exciting the public about the wonders of science, from atoms to the Universe.

Which moonwalker was a fellow passenger when teenage Tyson sailed to watch the 1973 total solar eclipse?

Neil Armstrong. A scholarship put the teenage Tyson aboard the liner SS Canberra off the coast of Africa, in company that also included the writer Isaac Asimov.

For his doctoral thesis, Tyson observed from Cerro Tololo, a mountaintop observatory in which South American country?

Chile. While there he also took images for the Calán/Tololo supernova survey, whose measurements of exploding stars later helped show that the universe's expansion is speeding up.

Besides wrestling and rowing, which activity was Tyson active in as an undergraduate?

Dance. He joined an Afro-Caribbean troupe in college and went on to a competitive dance team in graduate school, alongside the rowing and wrestling.

Which actor narrated Passport to the Universe, the first space show after Tyson's rebuild opened in 2000?

Tom Hanks. Tyson later took the narrator's seat himself for another of the theatre's space shows, Dark Universe, which explores dark matter and dark energy.

Tyson's 2018 book with Avis Lang examines the unspoken alliance between astrophysics and what?

The military. Accessory to War follows the technologies that stargazers and soldiers have shared for centuries, such as the German V-2 rocket, whose descendants carried astronauts to the Moon.

Tyson's 2022 book Starry Messenger shares its title with a 1610 treatise by which astronomer?

Galileo. His Sidereus Nuncius, or Starry Messenger, announced what a telescope had just shown him, including four moons circling another planet; Tyson's book turns that cosmic view on war, politics and race.

The asteroid named for Tyson was found by Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy, whose famous comet crashed into which planet?

Jupiter. The pair spotted asteroid 1994 KA from Palomar in May 1994, two months before the fragments of their comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 struck the giant planet; it became 13123 Tyson in 2000.

Which four-part PBS Nova miniseries did Tyson host in 2004?

Origins. Its four hours set out the latest thinking on how the universe, stars, Earth and life began, and Tyson co-wrote the companion book with Donald Goldsmith.

Which craft has Tyson long practised at his desk with quill and fountain pens?

Calligraphy. He is adept with quill pens, some of them homemade from feathers, and has been known to write poetry with them by candlelight.