In October 1995, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hadn’t yet become the pop culture science star he is today.

Tyson was newly appointed as the interim director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, where as a 9-year-old from the Bronx, he’d first seen the stars and glimpsed his future career.

Then the first exoplanet was discovered, and NBC Nightly News sent a camera crew to interview him as an expert on the discovery and what it meant to have finally found a distant planet around a far-off star.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks onstage during the Onward18 Conference in Oct. 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Onward18)

Neil deGrasse Tyson attends the Netflix’s “Lift” world premiere at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Jan. 8, 2024 in New York

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