Stephen Colbert and Neil deGrasse Tyson jovially spar over Pluto and the New Horizons mission

Stephen Colbert and Neil deGrasse Tyson playfully spar over Pluto — (Image credit: Late Show)

Stephen Colbert took some time Tuesday to cheer the New Horizons flyby of Pluto, and the historic photos it sent back from the recently demoted dwarf planet. "After nearly a century of near-total mystery, we finally know what Pluto really looks like," he said in a new CBS Late Show video: "A malted milk ball left in the rain, 4.7 billion miles from the sun." But like many Pluto fans, he said he is miffed that Pluto is no longer classified as a full-fledged planet, and he blamed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson for the demotion.

"You were driving the car that murdered Pluto as a planet," Colbert told Tyson, who happened to be sitting next to him in what appears to be a midsize cubicle. "I was an accessory — I didn't pull the trigger," Tyson protested, though he rated the Pluto flyby merely "awesome minus 10 percent," explaining that "it would be totally awesome if it was a bigger place."

The video is fun, and it's informative: You can learn quite a bit about Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, and Colbert cheerfully decodes Tyson's explanations with analogies to a bolo, Nascar, and Dante's Inferno. Things get almost heated when Tyson suggests solving the Pluto problem by classifying Earth (and the three other rocky planets) as a dwarf planet, too. There is some very mild swearing and a bit of minor phallic humor related to "shrinkage," but the whole family can watch this one. Peter Weber

The Week

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.