General Category > Astronomy & Science
Should we start giving exoplanets actual names like hurricanes?
Austritistanian:
Before 1950, hurricanes were given numbers in order of their formation date, e.g. Hurricane One, Hurricane Two, Hurricane Three, etc.
In the year 1950, we started giving hurricanes proper names like Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, and other names.
Look, I don't know about you, but I'm tired of having to tell my friends about 1SWASP J140747.93-394542.6 b, it's just a mouthful to say. Do you think that we should give exoplanets actual names, the way we do with hurricanes?
JMBuilder:
YES.
I'm tired of the weird codes.
atomic7732:
i don't really see the difference
maybe you could call the star Arlene, and say "Arlene has 8 planets. Arlene's 4th planet, Don is probably a Neptune-sized planet with a radius of 2.88 Earths."
the thing is, names are functionally equivalent to a single letter, which will never be reused, and hint at the order of discovery (and the general distance from the star in many cases), and stars with confusingly long designations like 2MASS J18574403+4918185 already have nicknames... in this case: Kepler-90
you don't say 2MASS J18574403+4918185 b, you say Kepler-90 b, which at least tells you a bit more information than planet Bret orbiting Arlene
and then you have the problem of coming up with enough names and arbitrating them so people don't call a planet Walmart because that's where some of their search funds are coming from etc, meaning you need to submit a proposal to the IAU to name each one and so it'll end up a lot like asteroids where yeah... you can name them, but very few ever actually get named because there are just so many
Austritistanian:
I didn't say that we should give planets hurricane names, though
atomic7732:
it was an example
i don't think using mythological names or sci-fi names or what have you would be any better (or even more lax rules, like with asteroids)
a name doesn't really help with an object without a "face", there's hardly anything distinguishing any of the exoplanets we know about, and it would probably make it harder to communicate because... just what planet is Athena again? And does it orbit the same star as Hades?
Again, example names
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