Slashdot Mirror
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."
Since in Chemistry the number of protons makes an easy periodic table, that wasn't much of a problem, but with Astronomy one has to consider orbit, mass, content, distance, etc., meaning there is probably a lot more to argue about, and no easily agreeable solution like the periodic table.
> what difference will it make what they name the object as long as you can search by criteria?
..just doesn't sound as cool as:
The Media would HATE this.
Asteroid ASD21904YH Might Hit Earth in 2880
'TerraBlaster' Asteroid Might Hit Earth in 2880
They only used 7 letters to make up all numbers. So it was probably simple for them to differentiate normal words and numbers that were usually not pronouncable, like CDXX, DXXVI, and XXX. Also the Greeks usually wrote a bar over numbers, or wrote them sideways so clear up any confusion. So I imagine that the Romans, standing on the shoulders of the Greeks, had that taken care of in some way by the time they rolled out their own numerical system.
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
I hope they use Philosophical Language because the last time this was tried, Waterhouse helped Wilkins come up with Real Character.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Would have thought astronomers would have had a naming convention already, its a pretty "old" science. Perhaps they will adopt something like that used in biological sciences, wherein there are a number of different "codes" [1] [2] [3] by which organisms are named. These codes are currently being challenged by a new system that has many up in arms...
only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd
Used to deal with all this stuff, It was especially important to us because we lived in Ireland and so we felt we had to promote Edgeworth's case over that upstart Kuiper. Anyway - now I'm in the US, I work as a software developer and.... I DJ at raves all the time these days.
truth is stranger than fiction sometimes