Our Solar System's Nomenclature Wars

RobotRunAmok writes "Plutinos, Centaurs, Cubewanos - the names Detroit has given some of their next gen SUVs? Nope. They are among the many colorful, and, some complain, confusing names which astronomers have given to celestial objects in the last decade. Ever wonder about the system of organization which astronomers use to name new space rocks? Apparently, so have many astronomers, because, according a Yahoo!/Space.com article, it's neither very systematic nor organized. Fear not: some clever star-minded chaps from Oxford and Cambridge have a plan to wring some order from the damp dishrag of astro-nomenclature chaos."

Comments

Like the old joke

[imsabbel]

of the old statue with the inprint "created 274BC".
Of couse they are not very systematic, because the system itself was just devolped while they were given names.

And if you really want a non-nonsense way the address them, there are catalogue-numbers and other ways to refer to them without room for misunderstanding...

Fear and terror

[panurge]

I suppose it's ironic* that the moons of Mars were named fear and terror (phobos and deimos) when in fact it's these distant rocks that should be worrying us. Realising just how many things are now known that periodically cross the Earth's orbit makes me wonder if the past ten thousand years or so of developing civilisation is just a period of unusual stability between ice ages and destructive impacts. Even a relatively small impact with a "soft" comet like body could presumably put enough crap into the atmosphere to create a very long winter. It's a pity that arms development seems more obsessed with fighting the "savage wars of peace" that merely threaten short term stability, and less with designing a delivery system and weapon to take out, or at least deflect, threatening asteroids that could make all the local wars irrelevant in a few seconds.

*All right, just irrational. Or something.

What's the point?

[Tenebrious1]

Yeah, labelling them will give you a vague idea where in the solar system it is. But if you want to be specific, then you're still going to have to look it up to find out exactly which object you're talking about out of the thousands or millions of objects which could be in the same general area.

It's like zip codes. 90001 is a zip code somewhere. I *think* the 9xxxx numbers are out on the west coast. If I *really* need to know where 90001 is, I'll look it up.

Astronomers aren't going to remember every detail of every piece of rock floating between Saturn and Uranus, they're going to have to look it up anyway. Search engines are pretty powerful these days, so what difference will it make what they name the object as long as you can search by criteria?

Re:I suggest we rename everything

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha...yes this is funny because, you know SCO has so much to due with the naming of celestial bodies that the joke is very appropriate. You know, I also think the RIAA will sue you if you send the any of the names over a P2P network and the MPAA will sue you if you make any videos of the night sky.

Furthermore, Bill Gates has used his evil intergalactic space fleet to extend the Micro$$$$oft monopoly throughout the galaxy. Did I miss anything else that doesn't apply to this topic.

Thanks.

Simple solution: Use namespaces.

[will_die]

That way they can keep reusing the same name and also provide more information on its location.

So now something like the earth would be refered to as 'milkyway.sol.earth' the earth's moon is 'milkyway.sol.earth.moon'.