A Quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson

But one of the coolest things about meteorites is that most were formed four-and-a-half-billion years ago, during the birth of our solar system, when, for reasons not yet known, a cloud of gas and dust was transformed into a sun with circling planets.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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About Billion Birth Cloud Coolest Coolest Thing Dust Formed Four Gas Half Known Most Our Planets Reasons Solar Solar System Sun System Things Transformed Were Years Years Ago

Quote Author

Neil deGrasse Tyson
American - Scientist
Born: October 5, 1958

If we want to unlock the secret behind the origin of our sun and its planets, it would be helpful to find some remnants from the birth itself, an event that took place about four-and-a-half-billion years ago.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Luckily, there are some rocks left over from our earliest days, asteroids formed during our solar system's birth. Occasionally, some of them drop in on Earth, and when they do, they're called meteorites.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I tell my students, with a feeling of pride that I hope they will share, that the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that make up ninety-nine per cent of our living substance were cooked in the deep interiors of earlier generations of dying stars. Gathered up from the ends of the universe, over billions of years, eventually they came to form, in part, the substance of our sun, its planets, and ourselves. Three billion years ago, life arose upon the earth. It is the only life in the solar system.

George Wald

We still don't know for sure what the trigger was, but since we've discovered meteorites with supernova dust, we do know that a violent explosion rocked our cosmic neighborhood at the time of our birth, and it's quite possible that without it, our stable, stately solar system would never exist at all.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

When I grew up as a kid, we didn't know there were any other planets outside of our own solar system. It was widely speculated that planet formation was an incredibly rare event and that it's possible that other planets just don't exist in our galaxy, and it's just this special situation where we happen to have planets around our sun.

John M. Grunsfeld

Once you've got the makings of a star, gravity draws leftover gas and dust into a giant swirling disk. The dust continues to stick together, clumping into rocky asteroids, which eventually become orbiting rocky planets. And voila: a solar system!

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Before 1995, the only planets we knew about were the planets in our solar system.

Debra Fischer

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.

David Grinspoon

The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid - one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence - hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large natural satellite.

Seth Shostak

The gas-giant planets in our solar system all have large moons.

Debra Fischer

The planets and moons of our solar system are blatantly visible because they reflect sunlight. Without the nearby Sun, these planets would be cryptic and dark on the sky.

Seth Shostak

No matter how you measure it, whether you measure the amount of mass or you measure the number of bodies, most of our solar system exists out beyond the orbits of the asteroids. So we could not have claimed to know our own solar system until Voyager had toured the giant planets.

Carolyn Porco

It now seems logical that all the stars, like our own sun, must have formed with a system of planets around them.

Debra Fischer

Small bodies in our solar system, like comets and asteroids, help us understand how the solar system formed and provide opportunities to advance exploration.

John M. Grunsfeld

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