Neil de Grasse Tyson Explores Universe in Bozeman

The universe may seem a terrifying vastness with hundreds of billions of stars, but Neil deGrasse Tyson makes it all feel a lot friendlier.

Tyson, 56, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and host of the 2014 TV series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” came to Bozeman to lecture Wednesday evening to a sell-out crowd of roughly 3,800 people at Montana State University.

Students and community members packed the Fieldhouse, eager to hear from the nation’s most popular explainer of science and the cosmos, an astrophysicist who speaks easily of “the majesty and grandeur of the universe.” The crowd greeted him like a rock star with cheers and standing applause.

A big bear of a man, Tyson joked with the audience, at times falling on the stage, or lumbering around to spoof the Super Bowl’s “manly” Roman numerals, or wagging an imaginary tail as he explained why Pluto, more than half ice, really isn’t a planet — a stand that has brought him hate mail from third-graders.

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