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Pluto's New Moons Named Nix and Hydra
Dean W, Armstrong writes "Pluto's two new satellites, previously identified as S/2005 P 2 and S/2005 P 1, received official names from the International Astronomical Union today. Nix and Hydra are named after the mother of Charon and the fierce nine-headed monster. The initials of the new names, N and H, call to mind the New Horizons spacecraft, on a fast trajectory to visit Pluto, just like Pluto's symbol calls to mind Percival Lowell."
They named both of these moons after mythical creatures that had almost everything to do with water. the Nix and the Multiple headed Hydra to which we owe many of our roots in the english language for water, I am assuming.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
I wonder if these new moons plus Pluto and Charon would be massive enough (as one) to be above the controversy over Pluto's planethood?
Probably not, the new moons don't have very much mass anyway, and Pluto's planethood is questioned as much by its eccentric orbit and its resemblence to Kuiper belt objects as by its mass.
Could someone more familiar with greek mythology please tell me how Pluto and the Hydra are connected?
... Beneath the waters was an entrance to the Underworld, and the Hydra was its guardian (Kerenyi 1959, p. 143...)
First off, Pluto is the Roman god of the underworld (the Greek was Hades).
Secondly, from wikipedia:
Its lair was the lake of Lerna in the Argolid.
Cerberus is already in use as an asteroid.
I'm not sure whether or not that has any bearing on the naming of planets and moons, but at least Hydra's better than Quaoar.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Not to nitpick too much, but they actually orbit a barycenter, or common center of gravity.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Hydra guarded the entrance to the Underworld that was under lake Lerna.
Really, I thought the Moon was called Luna.
We call it 'the' moon because it is 'our moon', just like we call Sol 'our Sun' and Terra 'the Earth'.
It's easier that way.
Earth's natural satellite is officially named "The Moon", yes, capitalized, with "The" included. In many Latin-based languages, it is called "Luna", which is what I prefer as a 'name'. Just as our planet's official name is "Earth", even though 'earth' can also refer to dirt.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Tell the kids about a mysterious planet X that lies beyond dinky little pluto and tell them nobody knows much about it. People aren't even sure if it exists! That seems much more exciting that a miniscule morsel of rock.
There's an asteroid with a moon (Ida/Dactyl, as I recall), so I don't know why Pluto would have a problem :) A moon is really just a small thing orbiting a big thing, after all, and it doesn't matter whether the big thing is a planet it or not.
Just to be clear:
"Terra" is generic "ground" in Latin. During the height of this word's popular usage, no distinction was made between the ground and the surface of the planet itself, just as we sometimes refer to soil as "earth".
"Luna" is generic "moon" in Latin. During the height of this word's popular usage, no distinction was made between the moon orbiting our planet and a moon orbiting any other body in space, since only our one moon was conclusively known to exist.
Other variants for "Earth" are "Tellur" (ancient Latin form of modern Latin derivitive "Terra") and "Gaia" (Greek). Another variant for "The Moon" is "Selene" (Greek).
The significance of English vs. Latin names:
English is very prevalent in modern technical/scientific disciplines due to its articulative flexibility through use of the root/prefix/suffix language construction derived from its Romantic/Latin heritage. Since Latin proper has mostly been replaced in the western world by Romantic language variants and dialects, English has become the language of much normative information in scientific circles. The reason is simple: articulative ability in a commonspeak language.
However, as in medicine, Latin is used as a disambiguation language. That is, one which contrasts sharply with commonspeak so as to instantly confer information without the ambiguities introduced by commonspeak language, such as homonyms or figures of speech. Hence, in scientific documentation, such as astronomical data, Latin designations are used to disambiguate the meaning of things, like planet names and moons, while providing a clear base for universally translating the correct meaning to other languages as needed for native language comprehension.
Interesting sidenotes:
Read more at Wikipedia:
These moons, and those newly discovered ones around Saturn obviously did not just come into existence in recent history, we merely detected them finally, and gave them names. To extrapolate, there will be many more that we haven't detected yet, most likely around the last three: Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, simply because detailed analysis by dedicated spacecraft hasn't been done yet. I think the Voyagers did a fairly thorough job, though, so whatever is left should be quite small, but may merit the classification of "moon" none-the-less (not sure what the criteria is...Saturn has billions of "moonlets" in its rings).
This sort of begs the question, how many names are we gonna have to come up with. Surely Classical mythology has a finite supply...