My question is in the naming. These things are turning up left and right, and naming them all is going to be a bitch. Is it possible that the last ones simply won’t get named at all? If so, out of fairness, is it possible to revoke the names of the retrograde irregulars that have been assigned so far? (I know we said your name was Erinome, but we’ve been thinking …)
Does anyone have an emergency backup plan? There are bound to be dozens more of these things, maybe hundreds. Now what?
I’ve always wondered why the Sci-Fi standard of naming isn’t used more often. Like we can call then Jovian I, Jovian II, Jovian III, Jovian IV, Jovian V,… and so on.
Because Sol-1 implies that the planet is the closest one to Sol. Sol-2 is the second closest, etc. We would designate Earth as Sol-3, not Sol-1 (the first one “discovered”).
However, we don’t discover other planet’s moons in order of their distance from their planet. So, if we used the convention you descirbed, we’d either have to keep re-numbering them, or they’d be numbered out of order.
That’s right…Gliese 876 has got 2 planets that we know of, and Gl876b is bigger and futher out than Gl876c, but neither have names-
yet…
(the tradition is that they don’t get names until they are resolved optically I believe)
Oh don’t worry, the moons of Jupiter will all get names eventually, the people that colonise them will see to that.
Each moon actually does have a numerical designation, awarded by the International Astronomical Union at the same time that the name is officially selected, and for the reasons Zev mentioned, they are numbered in order of discovery. The designation consists of the first initial of the planet and a roman numeral. Ganymede, for example, is JI, Europa is JII, etc.
In practice, these are rarely used, except sometimes for plot labels or something like that. Walk up to an astronomer and ask, “So, how’s SXI doing?” and you’re likely to get a blank look, even if that person studies that object!
I suspect that the only limitation on naming will come by size. Eventually we will begin discovering objects down to 100’s of meters in size, or 50 meters in size, etc. At what point will we stop calling it a moon, and just declare it a “moonlet” or something, and give it a moonlet number? Or perhaps we won’t even bother to catalog things that small.
IMHO If the obiting body in question is large enough to qualify as a planet instead of an asteroid then it should be called a moon, if it’s only an asteroid it should be called a moonlet or natural satelite.
Problem with that suggestion is that there’s no generally accepted defintion of “planet” or “asteroid”. “Planet” means the nine that we call planets, and “asteroid” just means a chunk of rock orbiting in the asteroid belt. (And even that’s dicey, since there are asteroids that have highly eccentric orbits, like Icarus.)
These are all good responses, but none of them really answer my question. Is there going to come a point when the number of “moons” (however that ends up being defined) becomes too daunting to name them all? I get that they all have designations, but are they really all going to get names? I was just wondering if the IAU has made any promises one way or the other.
Five years ago, I had them all memorized.:rolleyes:
