Naming Exoplanets

With the USA midterm elections safely behind us, let's turn our attention to an election of an entirely different nature, probably less important but still worth getting informed about.

A few months ago, the International Astronomical Union announced its intention to begin a campaign to involve the public in naming extrasolar planets. And I'm not talking about the existing names like HD 40307 d.

My first reaction is, "About time." The IAU probably is best known to the general public for demoting Pluto to the status of "dwarf planet", so one could interpret this as an attempt to win back the crowd.

Now, of the hundreds of planets discovered so far, only 305 are being named by this campaign. (They are listed at http://nameexoworlds.org/). What's going to happen is, ideas will be submitted to registered astronomy clubs and non-profits worldwide, and in January these organizations will each select the top 20-30 planets they want to name, followed by the proposed names. We, the general public, will get to vote on the final ballot in April, and the results will be announced in mid-August 2015.

Now, I like that planets are getting human-readable names, even if they're only a fraction of all the planets we've found so far (makes sense; they probably don't want to waste names on unconfirmed planets that later turn out to be false positives). However, one of the conditions of the proposed names bothers me. Most of the conditions are what you would expect: maximum length of 16 characters, preferably one word, no intellectual property names, etc. I wonder, however, if a severe mistake is not being made by requiring names be "not too similar to an existing name of an astronomical object".

That's a problem.

It's common in fiction to name extrasolar planets after figures from classical mythology. I'm sure a lot of people hope to make that concept reality with the discovery of new worlds. Unfortunately, take a brief wiki walk here. Look at the names of the minor planets in our solar system; notice that a lot of the mythological names are taken. By glorified rocks. I know I've said before that the distinction between "planet" and "asteroid" is largely a matter of semantics, but only "largely". You can't deny that a world like Mars or Earth and an asteroid like Vesta or Juno are not the same thing. So we have a wide array of evocative names that we may not be able to use like Romulus, Remus, Hestia, Pandora, Janus, the list goes on and on and on and on!

We shouldn't be afraid to have more than one astronomical object with the same name. We aren't afraid to have countless Washingtons, Franklins, Springfields, or Greenvilles. Look at Georgia: is it a state, or a country? If we're going to force ourselves to be bound by decisions made by astronomers decades or centuries ago, then science is broken somehow. The organization that said Pluto is no longer a planet shouldn't be getting cold feet about reusing the name of a flying rock. If 51 Pegasi b can't have its unofficial name "Bellerophon" made official because it's already taken by an asteroid so obscure its size isn't listed on Wikipedia, something. is. wrong.

Maybe I'm overreacting. Look at that list of minor planets and you will see some duplicate names, like Dione, which is also the name of a moon of Saturn. So there is a chance the IAU will be happy to reuse these names. I sincerely hope so. This campaign has the potential to bring extrasolar planets into the public eye, and isn't that in the IAU's job description somewhere? It should be.