“Cleared its neighborhood” is misunderstood by anyone who tries to understand it ny reading the words. It’s a term of art in planetary astronomy that’s would be better understood if it were “gravitationally dominates its neighborhood”
As a consequence it does not then share its orbital region with other bodies of significant size, except for its own satellites, or other bodies governed by its own gravitational influence. This latter restriction excludes objects whose orbits may cross but that will never collide with each other due to orbital resonance, such as Jupiter and its trojans, Earth and 3753 Cruithne, or Neptune and the plutinos.[3]
As I recall that was one of several Russian attempts to push for a different name than “Black Hole”, “Collapsar” being another. None really caught on outside of Russia.
Outside of Russia, a “frozen star” is a type of hypothetical star that may form in the far future.
Ah good to know.
I remember on TV’s QI they summarized a scientist’s opinion that perhaps earth and the moon should be considered binary co-planets (or some term like that) because Earth hadn’t “cleared its neighbourhood” of the moon.
Most likely of course the scientist’s argument was based more around our moon being relatively large, as satellites go, compared to the body it orbits. But at some point the concept of clearing the neighbourhood had come up, and either the QI team, or the scientist, had misunderstood it.
(Third option is I’m misremembering this)
I’ve never been crazy about “weak nuclear force”. I mean, this is one of the fundamental forces of existence we’re talking about here. There’s no need to be insulting.
I wonder if the term “gravity assist” in the context of the orbital mechanics of spacecraft might be considered another bad name, and certainly potentially misleading. When I first heard the term as a kid I wondered why this was so valuable, since the speed you gained by the gravitational attraction of a planet en route to somewhere else would be lost again as you departed.
Still, if that’s all it meant, it would still be useful because your average speed overall would have increased. But it generally means something quite different. It generally means essentially stealing some of a large orbiting body’s kinetic energy to accelerate (or sometimes decelerate) the spacecraft, and possibly change its trajectory as well in a desired direction, all without using any rocket fuel. A term like “gravitational slingshot” is maybe more descriptive. It’s not gravity per se that helps the spacecraft along, it’s its ability to tap into the kinetic energy of the large orbiting body.
The pic below for Voyager 2 illustrates the concept.
Our galaxy is called the Milky Way. Not only is that a ridiculous name, but it’s extremely Eurocentric, since other parts of the world had their own terms for it. Even English at one time.
The term frozen star referring to what we now call black holes does appear in the older literature. Referencing what an external observer would see for an object falling into an event horizon, and before it was shown that for an infalling observer the proper time to reach the singularity would be finite.
It might seem less ridiculous if we had clear skies like we had when the Milky Way was named, skies unobstructed by air pollution and light pollution, where you can clearly see the milky patch in the night sky that is part of our own galaxy. It’s a romantic term from earlier times when I presume people didn’t understand what it was.
Most names are comparably silly though. Apparently in England it was referred to as the Walsingham Way after some random shrine in Norfolk (another “Everest” style naming).
Best would have been adopting the Chinese or Japanese names, which are either “Silver River” or “River of Heaven”.
ETA: I don’t think it matters too much if proper nouns have silly names though. Eventually the name just becomes associated to the thing, not the etymology.
I’m currently reading this book by Thomas Hertog, who worked with Hawking up until his death. Hawking originally thought information was lost but ended up changing his mind. I can’t even begin to summarize the reason but it has to due with quantum entanglement and “holograms”. One thing I do tend to side with Hawking on is “No Multiverses”. Sorry Brian Greene. That’s another book I’m reading now.
Well, they could have called it a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature, but that wouldn’t have been a very good name for a television show.
And “hole” and “well” aren’t synonymous enough for you?
Well… Yes and no. Everywhere in space, a black hole is made entirely out of vacuum. There’s nowhere that there’s any mass at all. It’s just that there’s a lot of mass in that nowhere.
In the West, a “collapsar” is a hypothetical object that forms instead of a black hole, because some folks don’t like the theoretical issues with black holes, and so decided to invent something with much worse theoretical issues.
For that matter, using the word “force” for the fundamental interactions is a bit misleading, too. On the macroscopic scale, when objects interact, you usually have the same (or almost the same) objects coming out of the interaction as going in, with all that’s changed being their momenta. Forces change momentum, so we call the interaction a force. But in particle physics, quite often, what comes out doesn’t remotely resemble what went in, and what’s most interesting is the change in what particles you have at all.
