Tag Archives: astronomy

Let’s rename that Seventh Planet

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It has never (yet!) been a serious possibility, but the proposal to rename Uranus does keep popping up. And not simply because it sounds perverse in English no matter how you stress it, but because it violates the theme of the planets in our star system having names of gods in Latin.

“Uranus” was simply a Latin transliteration of a Greek god’s name. Moreover, the Greek Ouranos was god of the entire sky, so it’s a little weird to give a single planet this name.

Unfortunately, since Uranus was named (after a political fracas caused when William Herschel tried to name the planet he discovered after himself and then after the king of England) the other big Roman deities have mostly been scooped up. Ceres and Pluto are dwarf planets, for example. Vesta is an asteroid and Janus a satellite of Saturn.

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A Proposal For The Naming And Reference Of Extrasolar Planets

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With the recent explosion in the discovery of extrasolar planets, there has been some discussion about the naming convention astronomers use to identify new worlds, a system that some find confusing.  To be fair, the system is very scientific: each new object discovered is given an alphabetical identifier suffixed to the name of the primary star.  So, the first planet found circling Fulanis (not a real star) would be Fulanis b, the second discovered would be Fulanis c, etc., with Fulanis a being the star itself.

As simple as this system is, however, it’s difficult to appreciate its elegance if you’re not a scientist.  And it doesn’t reflect the way humans normally think of places. Imagine if newly discovered islands had been identified this way, with Atlantic b as the first discovered in the Atlantic, Pacific d as the third discovered in the Pacific, etc.

Not very user-friendly. Continue reading