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IAU: No, You Can't Name That Exoplanet
astroengine writes "The International Astronomical Union (IAU) — the official body that governs the designations of all celestial bodies — in their capacity of purveyors of all things 'official' has deemed attempts at crowdsourcing names for exoplanets illegitimate. 'In the light of recent events, where the possibility of buying the rights to name exoplanets has been advertised, the International Astronomical Union wishes to inform the public that such schemes have no bearing on the official naming process,' writes Thierry Montmerle, General Secretary of the IAU in Paris, France. Although the 'schemes' are not specifically named, the most popular U.S.-based "exoplanet naming" group Uwingu appears to be the target of today's IAU statement. Set up by Alan Stern, planetary scientist and principal investigator for NASA's Pluto New Horizons mission, Uwingu encourages the public to nominate and vote (for a fee) on names for the slew of exoplanets steadily being discovered."
You can name planets as you like. Whether you're understood or not depends on how many others follow your naming convention, of course.
the current naming system for stars is a.ready unique. The case that you are mentioning (alpha Lyrae etc.) is the so-called Bayer designation, that is a historic naming scheme for the around 1500 brightest stars. Official star names are NOT the Bayer names, but usually done according to their catalogue numbers. For example, my slashdot name, HDE 226868, is the donor star of the black hole Cygnus X-1, which happens to be number 226868 in the Henry Draper Extension catalogue. These names are unique. The IAU has since then gone to naming schemes that essentially are what you want already, i.e., for new astronomical objects the "names" really are the position of the object in the sky. So, for example, Swift J 164449.3+573451, a black hole candidate. This object was discovered by the Swift satellite and is at the location RA: 16h 44m 49.3s, declination 57d34m51s. (the J means that the coordinate is for the epoch and equinox 2000.0, i.e., it takes the precession of the Earth's axis into account) If the distance of this object were known, its position relative to us would be known. In a few years, when the Gaia mission is done, we will have such coordinates for all objects in the milky way. Note that your designation using "medium shifts" (similar to names used in some SciFi books and movies) is far less accurate than what astronomers can already do for those stars where distances are known, namely give spatial coordinates (x,y,z coordinates relative to Earth; you can calculate these easily based on the right ascension, declination, and distance). After the Gaia satellite, the Galactic coordinate system will be well enough known such that we can give absolute positions in a Galactic coordinate system instead of Earth centric. As the IAU notes, there is a clear precedent on how planets are named (essentially alphabetically in order of their discovery). What companies that try to "sell" naming rights are trying to do is to sham people into believing that this system does not exist. That some of that money is being used to fund science does not matter - fact is, not even the discoverers have final naming rights. And, yes, I am an astronomer.
So where's the IAU when I keep hearing this radio commercial for the bullshit "Internaltional Star Registry" from Rocky Mozell? Or did they already smack that one down, and all the suckers who keep giving him money to run commercials didn't get the memo?
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
It reminded me of the star naming schemes I read about decades ago. I checked to see what the IAU has to say about that. Whoever wrote that FAQ seems depressed at the sad state of intellect in commercial America.....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And YOU get a planet. And YOU get a planet. And YOU get a planet. And YOU get a planet. And YOU get a planet. And YOU get a planet.
Someone better call Oprah.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Asimov's Spacers tried that, and look how it worked out for them...
What are you, a Mormon?
These guys should have nothing to say about it. It should be the person who finds it gets naming rights, they earned it. If they want to sell their rights that should be their option too.
Yes, it does seem like there should be some rigor to the process. I don't want my descendants emigrating to the planet "My Hairy Balls"* because I was drunk and happened to have some spare cash lying around that day.
*although it would, perhaps, be a poetic illustration of the circle of life.
-Styopa
A while back, some people thought it might be good to name the potentially habitable planets. Therefore, http://www.sinister.com/names_of_potentially_habitable_planets.html
The International Astronomical Union gives astronomical objects their official names, by international agreement. They accept suggestions and proposals, but they do not sell naming rights.
You can call astronomical objects whatever you want. The IAU is pointing out that paying someone for the privilege is kind of a dumb thing to do.
Hence my having stressed lexicality... scope. If you are in the neighborhood of london, england, you can just say 'london' and people can presume with almost complete accuracy that you mean the one nearby. There are, however, probably like 20 londons in the USA... Now... a star light ours (Sol) is not remarkable at all. It's a dim, boring little star amidst a sea of hundreds of billions of stars amidst a sea of tens of trillions of seas of suns. It's only slightly less podunk than its neighbors, but dwarfed in long distance visibility by sirius and even more so by vega and arcturus in our immediate vicinity. That said, as a TERM, sol(ar) would be super useful in describing suns that would appeal to us in any given neighborhood... and to call a world 'terran' would be descriptive as well... so the names, as we do already on earth, are likely to be used over and over and over and over should we ever span galactic. If you're in this neck of the woods, then you could probably just say 'terra' and, as with the City of London, most anyone would know to which of the tens of thousands of planets in the vicinity you are referring to... but if you're traveling here from thousands of light years away, then you'll have flown passed dozens of planets the pilgrims on which would like to be able to name in homage to or for descriptive similarity the world of their origins. So it just makes sense, if you can get around out there, that you'd do exactly what we do here on earth... reusing names and referencing their 'depth of name' based on the scope of your current conversation. Orionia (arm) Arcturum (region) Sol (star) Terra (planet) Luna (moon) v. ??? (arm) Bellatrixum (area) Aria (star) Ares (planet) Terra (moon). There are lots of names yet to be used for planets.... but there are far too many out there not to be repeated thousands of times over.
Shouldn't we ask whoever is living there what the name is?
I say we name all exoplanets "Pluto", just for spite.