Astronomers Rename Famous Exoplanets

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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/

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