Astronomers Rename Famous Exoplanets
Source: By Lee Billings, Scientific American Blog
Excerpt:
More than 30 worlds have new names drawn from world mythology, literature and history. ...The IAU’s NameExoWorlds
contest, which began in July 2014, consisted of public and semi-private
rounds of submissions and voting on names for 32 exoplanets and 15 host
stars. ...The very first confirmed exoplanetary system, announced in 1992,
consists of three rocky worlds orbiting a stellar remnant, a millisecond
pulsar ignominiously named PSR 1257+12. Now, the pulsar is suitably
called “Lich,” a name for an undead wizard from Greek, Dutch, and Norse
folktales. Its three planets bear similarly spooky names drawn from
ghostly mythological creatures—“Poltergeist,” “Phobetor” and “Draugr.”
Pegasi 51, the first normal star found to host exoplanets, now has a
more mellifluous name: “Helvetios,” a Latinized reference to the
Helvetians, a tribe of Celts that lived in the Swiss Alps. The name nods
to the Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who discovered
the star’s giant planet, Pegasi 51 b, in 1995. Now, that planet is
officially dubbed “Dimidium,” Latin for “the half,” a reference to its
mass, which is half of Jupiter’s. Other systems have gained the names of notable figures from history
or literature. As proposed by a group in the Netherlands, the star 55
Cancri will now be called “Copernicus,” and its planets will be called
“Galileo,” “Brahe,” “Lippershey,” “Janssen,” and “Harriot.” And Spain
succeeded in exporting one of its great authors to the heavens—the star
Mu Arae is now also known as “Cervantes,” and is accompanied by planets
named for his masterwork Don Quixote—“Dulcinea,” “Rocinante,” and, of course, “Quijote” and “Sancho.”....http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/astronomers-rename-famous-exoplanets/