Damn it Living, I was going to say that. In fact, that was one of my first thoughts on seeing the name.
Some of those suggested above won’t fly. Vulcan and Nemesis are associated with two non-existing but well-known planets. And I don’t mean anything to do with Star Trek, either.
Sometime in the 19th century, someone claimed to have seen a planet orbiting inside of Mercury. They named it Vulcan. Lots of effort was made by others to verify it, but to no avail. It’s pretty much certain it doesn’t exist.
Nemesis is supposedly a large brown dwarf in a humongously large orbit that takes it into the Oort Cloud every 26 million years. There it would disturb some comets so they’d come zipping into the inner Solar System and crash into the Earth and cause an extinction event. The only evidence for Nemesis was a supposed periodicity of the said events. It’s generally agreed among astronomers that the statistical analysis that showed the periodicity is flawed.
Other Kuiper Belt objects which have already been named include Varuna, after a Hindu god; Ixion, a greek mythological figure, and Quaoar, a name from North American Indian mythology;
it is encouraging that these objects are being given names from a wide range of sources.
As it is a typically Dutch name, the Dutch pronounciation would probably be appropriate. Which unfortunately does not have an English equivalent I can think of. If you know French, the Dutch ui sound is rather similar to the French vocals in oeil (eye).
Hey – don’t make fun of “Uranus”. It was almost named “George” (True!!!)
Uranus was the first planet to be discovered since classical times. Herschel, who discovered it, wanted to curry favor (brown-nose) with the British king, so he suggested naming it “Georgius Sideris”. Cooler and wiser heads prevailed, and they kept up the mythological connections.
Of course, that didn’t stop Percival Lowell from sneakily making the symbol for the planet “Pluto” (and the first two letters of its name) his own initials.
Uranus was a Greek god, not Roman, and has no Roman counterpart. (He’s not Atlas!) See Pantheon for more details.
Also, practically every other name in Roman mythology has been used up in naming asteroids. They’re going to use other cultures’ mythologies out of necessity.
OT, but the etymology of Dysprosium is that it’s new latin based on the greek dysprositos hard to get at.
And Terbium, Erbium, Ytterbium and Yttrium aren’t named after the locations in which they were discovered. They’re all named after the town Ytterby in Southern Sweden.
Dysprosium is derived from Greek dysprositos, hard to get at. Yttrium, Ytterbium and Erbium were named after a village called Ytterby outside Stockholm, Sweden, were they were first discovered together with Holmium, which is named after Stockholm.
Not almost, it was. The name Uranus didn’t come into common usage until 1850, some 69 years following its discovery.
I kinda like the fact that Uranus had two names for a while - both Georgum Sidus and the name of its discoverer. Yes, for several decades our fine solar system had Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn… and Herschel. Kinda makes me see a dramatic camera shot panning across these heroic and majestic statues of the gods… only to pan down to a weedy little twerp in Coke-bottle glasses and a short-sleeved oxford shirt.
Sedna is being described as a provisional name, so if a concensus is reached that it should be considered a planet it could still be named after a Roman god.
To me it shouldn’t be a planet. It seems a lot more like a comet. The only reason it’s not is that its orbit doesn’t cross the orbits of the major planets. If it were up to me, I’d demote Pluto and have eight planets and Pluto and Sedna would be planetoids. I think Gustav Holst had it right all along.
I seem to remember that Will Hay, a well-known 1930s British film star and comedy actor was an amateur astronomer and made some interesting discovery in space in the early 30s? Anyone have any more information?
