From The New York Times 2014/08/05 nytimes/2014/08/05/science/plan-to-liven-official-naming-of-stars-and-planets-hits-clunky-notes.html?_r=1 You Won’t Meet the Beatles in Space Plan to Liven Official Naming of Stars and Planets Hits Clunky Notes When you think about the far future of the human race, do you dream of sailing the tropical oceans on Gliese 1214b? Walking around like Superman on Kepler 7b? Do you wonder if it is possible to make a living in the snows of MOA-2007-BLG-192-Lb? In the last 20 years, astronomers have found more than a thousand worlds — exoplanets — circling foreign stars. And they all have names only a mother robot could love. Some of them look or sound like caricatures of scientific notation, about as memorable as license plate numbers. I need a cheat sheet to remember which of these planets are which, and why they matter. Kepler 7b, for example, is the “Styrofoam planet” discovered by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, a Jupiter-size world so puffy it would float. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage video Video: More Out There Videos » video Video: Profiles in Science | The Planet HunterMAY 12, 2014 A vast majority of stars — like secret agents — don’t have names at all, only the numbers by which astronomers have laboriously listed them over the centuries. For example, HR 8799, which was seen by telescopes in Hawaii to have planets circling it like olives in a martini glass, is listed in the Yale Bright Star catalog, which was a successor to the Harvard Revised Photometry catalog, first published in 1884, thus the initials HR. If there are planets, the star gets a lowercase “a” added to its number and its planets get b, c, d and so on, in the order in which they are discovered. It becomes even more confusing if the star is one of a double or a triple star. Alpha Centauri, only four light-years from here, is actually a double star, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. There is a third star, Proxima Centauri, sometimes called Alpha Centauri C, in the system. Alpha Centauri B is thought to have a planet, which would be the nearest exoplanet to Earth, and so is known as Alpha Centauri Bb. Catchy, right? But now help is on the way. The International Astronomical Union, in collaboration with Zooniverse, a website that promotes citizen participation in science, has announced a plan by which the public can vote on names for exoplanets. The good news is that these names will have the imprimatur of the world’s professional astronomical community and will therefore be as official and authoritative as the numbers we now have. The bad news is that this is the organization that kicked Pluto out of the club of major planets eight years ago, demoting it to dwarf status, as a result of a confusing and still controversial debate about what makes a planet. Never mind what schoolchildren have learned for the last 70 years. The rules of NameExoWorlds, as the contest is called, are only a little less complicated. To begin with, not everyone gets to suggest names for these worlds. Only groups or astronomical organizations, like clubs or planetariums, that register on a website to be set up this fall will be eligible for the fun. Moreover, not every planet is up for grabs. The Astronomical Union has posted a list of 260 planetary systems considered well established enough to be named. They include 305 planets. Most of them are single children — one planet circling one star — though some are in bigger families. The biggest is 55 Cancri, which has five planets circling a sunlike star about 40 light-years from here in the constellation Cancer. Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Registered groups will participate in a first round of voting to establish a shortlist of 20 or 30 of these systems. Then each group can propose names for just one “exoworld,” defined as a planet or planets with a host star. The hitch is that they will have to come up with appropriate names for all the members of the system, including the star. No cherry-picking your favorite planet and naming it, say, Trantor, after the center of the galactic empire in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. The challenge, then, as Thierry Montmerle of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics and general secretary of the Astronomical Union, explained in an email, lies in finding a theme for naming each body at once, like the solar system, with its names from Roman and Greek mythology. Perhaps, Dr. Montmerle said, “we should indeed think of the contest in terms of ‘fun’ — ‘educated fun,’ that is.” I could imagine a group of nicely synchronized planets named, for example, John, Paul, George and Ringo. Except that names of living people are forbidden, as are those of pets and religious or political figures. All this registering and proposing is a prelude to the main event. Once the names have been proposed, the public can vote on them. After a screening by yet another committee of the astronomical union, the winners will be announced at the group’s meeting in Honolulu next year. If you think this is a bit clunky, you are not alone. “In my view, it’s too cumbersome, too ponderous and too controlling,” said Alan Stern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who has at least a couple of bones to pick with the astronomical union. Dr. Stern, who is the lead scientist for the New Horizons mission that will arrive at Pluto next summer, disagreed with the decision to demote Pluto, calling it “laughable.” He is also a promoter of an alternate naming system known as Uwingu (pronounced oo-WING-oo, Swahili for “sky”), which lets you propose names for exoplanets or craters on Mars for $9.99 apiece. The names go into an online database where anyone can vote on them (99 cents a vote). If your name gets 1,000 votes, you can choose which planet it goes with. The money goes into the Uwingu Fund, which gives out grants for research and other worthy projects like combating light pollution or the Allen Telescope Array’s search for extraterrestrial radio signals. Anything goes. You can propose the name of your dog or any of the Beatles. A brief perusal of the leading vote-getters at Uwingu recently turned up names like Aurelius, after the Roman emperor; Zeo Nio; No More Taxes; and Pale Blue Dot. The catch is that these names are not sanctioned by the International Astronomical Union. And the fact that you have to pay for them seems “a bit squalid,” in the words of Mike Brown, a Caltech astronomer whose discovery of a dwarf planet bigger than Pluto in 2005 (he called it Eris for the goddess of discord, natch) helped seal Pluto’s fate. But there is a bigger problem in this frenzy of naming, as Dr. Brown pointed out. How many of these planets actually deserve names? How much will we ever know about any of them? We haven’t yet discovered Earth 2.0, the twin that might be habitable, or anything with life, continents or any place a person could get a drink. Let’s hope those are coming. And those are the worlds we will be talking about 20 or 50 years from now, the ones whose names schoolchildren will have to memorize. “But I understand how these things can lead to interesting public engagement, so I like it,” Dr. Brown said of the astronomical union’s plan. Nevertheless, if it were up to me, I would hold my fire, save some of the best names, like Trantor or Sagan or Einstein — or John, Paul, George and Ringo — for when the galaxy has begun to fulfill its promise. Perhaps in the meantime, the astronomical union will continue to loosen up.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 02:37:41 +0000
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