Neil deGrasse Tyson Isn't Really Feeling the Ninth Planet Thing

"I don't want to get all cozy with it."

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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This week science ruined Spider-Man for all of us, but it also gave us something that's arguably just as cool: the announcement of a brand new ninth planet. Scientists don't know much about the mystery planet yet—they haven't even seen it through a telescope—but as Neil deGrasse Tyson told Stephen Colbert during an appearance on The Late Show last night, it's absolutely, definitely not Pluto. Because we all know how Neil deGrasse Tyson feels about Pluto.

Tyson explained that the planet was in fact discovered by colleagues of his. "The way to figure it out is to look at the rest of the stuff that’s orbiting out there, and you say, 'This is collecting over here when it should be over there,'" he told Colbert. "There must be some unseen force of gravity enabling that. So you back calculate the equations and you say, 'There’s got to be an object ten times the mass of Earth over there to make that happen.' Thus the announcement."

Although he's clearly excited about the new planet, Tyson is skeptical about adopting it just yet. "We want to call it planet nine and make it part of the family, but the thing is so far away it has yet to complete an orbit around the sun since the Ice Age," he said. "So I don't want to get all cozy with it." So the bad news is it's kind of a haul, but the good news is we'll have somewhere new to colonize when we turn our planet into a burning trash heap.

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