What are some wild stories behind names in astronomy and physics? How did we get the jargon words that we did? What are some of the funniest names? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT (AUTO-GENERATED)

In the fabulous ages of ancient times, the appellations of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were given to the planets as being the names of their principal heroes and divinities. In the present more philosophical era, it would hardly be allowable to have recourse to the same method and call it Juno, Pallas, Apollo, or Minerva for a name to our new heavenly body. The first consideration of any particular event or remarkable incident seems to be its chronology. If in any future age it should be asked when this last found planet was discovered, it would be a very satisfactory answer to say in the reign of King George the third. That was written by astronomer William Herschel to his friend who had prompted him to do the astronomical community a favor and give a name to his newly discovered planet.

And so Herschel complied naming this new planet Georgium Citus or George's star, partly for patriotic reasons, partly for the reasons outlined in his letter, and also partly, I'm I'm just guessing here that King George the third, the king of England at the time just happened to be giving Herschel a stipend in lots of special favors and access. That was shortly after 17/81 when William Herschel had discovered this new planet, and here we are almost 250 years later, and we certainly do not call that planet George's star. And to be quite frank, most people don't even remember King George the 3rd himself. He gets a special note in American history classes as the guy we rebelled against, I suppose, but not much else. And for decades after 17/81 various names were floated around for this new planet, Astraea, Sibyl, Neptune, Minerva.

But it was another friend of Hershel's, Johann Bode, that suggests the name that eventually stuck, Uranus, the father of Saturn in Roman mythology. And remember Saturn in turn was the father of Jupiter. So it made a good amount of sense and it just seemed to click, Notwithstanding the awkward fact that Uranus was just the Latin translation of the original Greek name, not the proper name of the equivalent Roman god, and that kinda sticks out. We don't know if good old Johann knew that or just didn't like the Roman name or whatever. We don't know.

Either way, it would take another 70 years, 70 years before the last holdout, the Royal Nautical Almanac office, finally stopped calling it George's star in favor of what by then everyone else had settled on. And that is not the only interesting story when it comes to naming planets. In 18/46, French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier predicted the existence of a new planet beyond the orbit of Uranus which was subsequently found. While Le Verrier initially proposed Neptune for the name of this new planet, he quickly changed his mind and tried to insist that everybody call it wait for it Le Verrier. He had support in the French Observatory, which by then had started calling Uranus Herschel instead as a way to retcon history to make Le Verrier's choice more palatable, but basically everybody outside of France just rolled their eyes and kept calling it Neptune, which also being a Roman deity seemed to be keeping in with tradition.

The last of the planets to be discovered was Pluto for which thousands of names were suggested to the Lowell Observatory where it was discovered. Eventually, 3 contenders rose to the top Minerva, Pluto, and Cronus. Minerva was unfortunately out because even though it's a very pretty name, it was already the name of an asteroid, and that would have been awkward. Cronus was a serious contender, but really the only reason we don't call it that is that it was heavily promoted by a certain astronomer named Thomas Jefferson Jackson See. And See was, how do I put this mildly, kind of a jerk, and nobody liked him.

And because that was his favorite, automatically nobody liked Cronus. So, Pluto, I guess. These three examples show that back in the day we decided on the names of planets, but I wouldn't necessarily call it a process. It was more of a a happening. Names floated around and some gained more or less popularity than others.

Some countries stuck to one particular name while others shifted, and then through time and attrition, a particular name just kind of stuck. Nowadays, however, we have a much more formal process. You ever get one of those offers to name a star after your kid or your parent or your pet parakeet, and you pay a company $50 and they send you back a certificate with the coordinates and properties of the star? Spoiler alert. It's always a red dwarf star invisible to the naked eye.

And the certificate has its new name. Yeah. That's a scam. Don't do it. It's not official.

It's not recognized. You just paid $50 to get a cheap certificate printed and mailed to you. A much better way to spend your money would be on Patreon. That's patreon.com/pmsutter where you can contribute to this show to keep it rolling. That's right.

I use this is my job. This is what I do. I love communicating science, and Ask A Spaceman is my most favorite thing to do, and Patreon keeps this show rolling. Go to patreon.com/pm so that I can find out how you can contribute. And, hey, if you want a star name certificate printed out and mailed it to you, I'll do it.

Anyway, these, scams are scams because, about a 100 years ago, the astronomical community decided that they needed to tidy up this whole naming stuff in space business. And in doing so, they created the International Astronomical Union or IAU, which is today headquartered in Paris, France. A bonus insight info, it's now housed inside the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, So where I spent 3 years in a research position, and it's it's really surreal. You just walk down a random hallway and turn a corner. It's just there.

The International Astronomical Union is it's a small office inside of a larger building. So here's the thing. If you discover something new, like a new planet, or a new star, or a new asteroid, or even a new geographical feature on another planet, you do get first dibs on naming rights, but your choice of name is not guaranteed. Instead, you suggest your name to either the working group for planetary system nomenclature or the working group on star names, which are both just as bureaucratic as they sound, And these working groups get together and decide if they'll accept your name or go with something else. Recent example of this is the New Horizons probe, which flew by an object in the Kuiper Belt, and the initial name that the astronomers behind the mission decided to call this object was Ultima Thule, which means the limits of what's known, the limits of the known world is some, you know, Latin phrase.

But then it turned out that that has some connections to Nazism, and nobody wants that, and so they worked with the IAU to propose a new name, Arrokoth, which did stick. Still, the IAU gives discoverers a lot of leeway and also generally respects existing tradition, which allows us to maintain some truly fantastic names, especially when it comes to asteroids and nebulas and galaxies, which is pretty handy because there are, hold on. Checking my notes here. A lot of asteroids and nebulas and galaxies and many have yet to be discovered and cataloged and mapped, which gives you the chance to name your very own. But there are some fun names that are unfortunately already taken, and so you're you're unfortunately not gonna be able to use the following.

When it comes to nebula, we already have a Spaghetti Nebula, a Manatee Nebula, a Lemon Slice Nebula, a Soccer Ball Nebula, a Cotton Candy Nebula, and a a fetus Nebula. Wow. Oh, an honorable mention goes to Gomez's hamburger. But, unfortunately, these are all traditional names for objects. If you identify a new nebula, the IAU is gonna force you to use a certain pattern, which is some acronym, some short sequence of letters to identify your survey or method or whatever followed by a sequence of numbers, to serve as a unique identification.

I know that takes all the fun out of it. You can still have an unofficial name that you can blast out on social, but the IAU is only going to recognize that catalog and number, which is a real bummer. When it comes to galaxies, we also have some very fun names. We have the Tadpole Galaxy, the Porpoise Galaxy, the Sunflower Galaxy, the Cigar Galaxy, and Saint Catherine's Wheel, which is named after a medieval torture device. Unfortunately, from now on, you have to use an acronym plus a sequence of numbers.

The IAU no longer accepts fun names for galaxies. You're only allowed to use official boring names. Of course, it doesn't stop you from naming things informally, putting it in your research papers or whatever you want, but the official name is going to be very boring. I'm very sorry. When it comes to asteroids, oh, they're all over the place.

We've got Tom Hanks. We've got mangroin. We've got mister Spock, James Bond, all even, all odd, Monty Python, Terry, and Potato. The good news is when it comes to asteroids, the IAU actually lets you pick a name. They are not gonna be killjoys here, and you're not gonna be stuck with some boring catalog designation.

You actually get to name an asteroid all on your own if you discover it, and they will generally accept your proposal for a name, but the once again, there are gonna be some rules. So the rules are your name for the asteroid must be 16 characters along or less. We don't want supercalifragilisticexpialidocious asteroid. If at all possible, it's gonna be one word, which is why the asteroid Tom Hanks is t o m h a n k s, one word. Uh-huh.

We can get around that. It must be pronounceable. So any of Elon Musk's children are not eligible for asteroid names, and it must be non offensive. And, yes, they get to decide what is offensive or not. And it must not be too similar to names of other minor planets like asteroids or other natural planetary satellites.

So, you can't go around calling it Europish. It's not gonna fly. If named after a military or political persona, 100 years must have passed since the person died or the event occurred. So no Barack Obama asteroid for a while now. No commercial names.

You can't have the PepsiCo asteroid or the Procter and Gamble, one word, asteroid. No commercial name. Sorry. And names of pets are strongly discouraged, but I don't know how exactly they enforce it unless you explicitly say, I'd like to name it after my pet, Freckles. You can just say, I just wanna call it Freckles, and they won't know the difference.

You also get to name, newly discovered moons and satellites of any of the major planets. You also get to name geographical features on any of the bodies in the solar system where you get a lot of freedom there. But there are rules there. There are, guys, I encourage you. If you discover a new geographical feature on a moon of a world in our solar system, I encourage you to visit the IAU's website to adhere to their naming conventions.

But that's just astronomy. That's just astronomical names for objects. We have a lot of names that come from simply tradition and attrition. Nowadays, we have a more formalized rigorous process that honestly sucks all the fun out of it, but there are some exceptions like asteroids and geographical features. Also, in astronomy, there are a lot of phenomena.

There are just things that happen in the sky, which typically have their own tortured nonsensical histories. Oh, and as a caveat, I'm skipping star names because I would love to do an entirely different episode just on star names because that'd be so much fun. There is such a rich complicated history behind star names. I already have a questions couple questions in the bank. Feel free to ask to get your name on that list when I eventually do that episode.

Anyway, astronomical phenomena typically have very complicated and very confusing histories, like, the different kinds of supernovae. You know, for a while, all bright stars that randomly appeared in the sky were just called Novae. And then in the early 20th century, we decided that, you know, this wasn't gonna really work because there it seemed like there were different kinds of Novi. Some were dimmer, some were brighter, some had certain features in their spectrum, some didn't. And so this is how we get the classical Novi.

This is how we get the cataclysmic variable stars. This is how we get type 1 a, type 2, type yeah, etcetera, etcetera, which is just a confusing mess of jargon because astronomers, a 100 years ago, were trying to bring some order out of the chaos, and they kinda sorta succeeded, but not all the way. Dark matter is a horrible name. A better name would be invisible matter or ghost matter, but we get it from Fritz Zwicky who in the 19 thirties, made the initial discovery of it. He didn't realize what he was looking at, and he called it dunkle materi, which translated as dark matter, and it just kinda stuck.

There's the whole thing with stellar classification which is, oof, we did this. We talked about this with Annie Jump Cannon and how we got to this state, but instead of just having stellar class 1, stellar class 2, this is stellar something simple and straightforward. We have the OBA, and then we have subtypes. And it I'm trying not to get mad at my colleague astronomers here, but this is what happens when you let the astronomers make classifications for objects before we actually have a physical understanding of how they work. You get all this confusing mess.

Astronomy isn't alone in this, however. Physics has its own long beautiful tingled history with weird names for various concepts. There are the quarks, you know, these subatomic particles that group together to form protons and neutrons and and mesons and whatnot. This word was coined by Murray Gell Mann, a physicist who first discovered the idea of quarks when he, unraveled the workings of the strong nuclear force. These the word quarks come from, Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce.

There's a quote, 3 quirks for Muster Mark. He wrote in a private letter in 1978 to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, saying that he had been influenced by Joyce's words, and he said the illusions to 3 quirks seemed perfect. Murray had discovered 3 quirks, and he needed 3 quarks to make the strong nuclear force work, and and then that was it. Since then, now we know that there are actually 6 quirks, not 3, and so that puts a little bit of wrinkle in it, but the name stuck. Coming back to dark matter, which is always mysterious, there are different models for dark matter.

And especially early on, there was a big debate if dark matter was made of otherwise normal matter that was just dim or dark, but were big and compact and heavy. These were the massive compact halo objects or MACHOs. And in contrast to that was an idea that dark matter was some new kind of subatomic particle that was flooding every galaxy, and that these were the weekly interacting massive particles or the wimps. So for decades in the astronomical community, there were very, very serious discussions, discussing the various strengths and merits of wimps versus machos. It turns out that the wimps have won, by the way, although we still do not fully know the identity of the dark matter particle.

There are other weird words that just appear in physics for no apparent reason. There is the Kugelblitz, which is a hypothetical form of star where if you get enough light together in a big enough bundle, you can make briefly a star and then it collapses into a black hole, Kugelblitz. There's syzygy, which is when 3 astronomical bodies line up in a straight line. There's jerk. That's pretty cool.

So, you know, velocity is, the rate of change of position. If I start moving my position, I can measure that with a velocity. And the rate of change of velocity is given by acceleration. A higher acceleration means my velocity is changing that much faster. But acceleration itself can be have a rate of change that we can measure, and we call that the jerk.

Usually doesn't come in handy in most cases, although, very long trains are very careful to monitor their their jerk, to make sure there's not too much of it. And you can keep going. The rate of change of jerk is called snap. The rate of change of snap is called crackle, and, yeah, you're ready for this. The rate of change of crackle is called pop.

And then and then there are a bunch of jargon terms that you should just incorporate into your daily vocabulary. These are words that appear all the time in physics and astronomy discussions, and it just become part of the parlance, and and they become so ingrained that you don't realize after a while that these are special unique jargon terms. And these are words that I have, accidentally inadvertently found myself using in a non science context, and then people get very, very confused. And and thanks to my family for pointing out when I get a little jargony. For example, there's the word degenerate, which has a normal everyday common sense understanding.

You degenerate person. In physics, it means something else. It's a particular state of matter where quantum energy states are as full as they can possibly be. And so a state of matter where all the energy states are full is called a degenerate state. And so we have degenerate stars like neutron stars and white dwarfs, which are built from their subatomic particles filling every quantum energy level possible.

They are not outcasts. They are not horrible stars. They are just degenerate stars. There is the word epsilon, which is, you know, the Greek letter. But this Greek letter appears in physics math a lot to represent, an incredibly small change An incredibly small change.

So, like, if I adjust something, if I wanna see how a system will react, if I just change it just by a little bit, I will add an Epsilon, and then I can use that. I can follow that through the math to see, what it entails. In fact, Epsilon means an infinitesimally small change, which is not a big deal until you apply it an infinite number of times, and then you actually get a change. If that sounds counterintuitive, that's that's basically calculus. In contrast to epsilon and so what I find myself saying, like, you know, an epsilon here is going to, you know, etcetera, etcetera.

And everyone looks at me weird, but I'm used to that by now. In contrast to the epsilon, there is the delta, which is also a Greek letter, but that means a large finite measurable change. So if you have a big change, it's the delta, and a tiny tiny change, it's an epsilon. Also, there is Gedankenexperiment, German for thought experiment. For some reason, physicists still use the German word here, Gedankenexperiment, and they will say, okay.

Let's think through this Gedankenexperiment, or I'm about to present to you a Gedankenexperiment instead of just saying thought experiment. This might be in honor of Einstein who, a, was German, and b, was an absolute genius when it came to thought experiments. He would write extensively about how his imagining a physical scenario and wondering about it would lead him through his imagination to some fantastic physical insight. That was definitely a superpower that he had with his Gedanken experiments. We also have sanity check.

When physicist or an astronomer comes to resolve you, you you fill up the chalkboard with some calculation or the the computer runs through its code and it produces a result and it gives you an answer. Your first step is to do a sanity check. Does it have the right order of magnitude? Is it is it in the ballpark of what you expect? Does it have the right units?

Does it have the right sign? Or are we missing anything major? Is there a factor of 2 that we drop somewhere? The answer is almost always yes. That somewhere in our calculations, we forgot a 2 somewhere from one line to the next, and so we perform a sanity check.

There's also n. I mean, why stick to just Greek letters when we have the Latin alphabet too? N. N just means any whole number. And this is a stand in in physics and many other fields of science, of course, to represent any whole number.

You don't know which particular whole number it's gonna be, but it's just gonna be n. So I will find myself to give you an example, I will find myself saying, I have told you n times, which means I don't know exactly how many times I've already told you, but it is some whole number between 1 and, say, a1000. I've told you n times already. Still doesn't work when I tell my kids that. Anyway, there is also trivial and nontrivial.

You know, in common everyday language, trivial means unimportant Trivia. But in physics, trivial means easy, simple, straightforward. What's 2+2? Trivial is 4. What's the at the center of a black hole?

Non trivial, a little bit harder. And then there's my absolute favorite, hand wavy. There's this semi joke, say someone's giving a lecture and they're writing out their equations, and you're following it step by step. And every sentence is connecting to the last. This is all making sense.

And then there's a step where the the person speaking, making this argument just as and then we're just gonna assume that it works like this, and then maybe goes like this, and then we're gonna and we can just ignore this part, and then they just keep going. And if you follow their physical actions during that moment, you will see them waving their hands, like, I don't know. But we need to make some progress. So I'm gonna assume this and this. I'm not exactly sure if that's gonna work, but we're but we're just gonna do it.

That's a hand wavy argument. You can see it in papers to academic journal articles. You'll see an argument proceeding, and then you'll see a step where the authors just kinda skip a few or make some assumptions just so that they can keep going and they don't wanna be stuck. But they're not exactly confident in their what they're saying, so they say, oh, we're just and so that kind of hand wavy argument where you just, I don't know. It seems reasonable, but I can't really justify it.

Anytime you say something that seems reasonable, but you can't really justify it, you are making a hand wavy argument. Now that you are armed with all this vocabulary, you can go off and impress strangers, and I will see you next time. Thanks to Matt on email and Chris on email for the questions that led to today's episode, and thank you to all. And I really do mean all my Patreon contributors. That's patreon.com/pmsutter.

A special, special thanks go to my top contributors this month. Justin g, Chris l, Barbara k, Duncan m, Corey d, Justin z, Nalia, Scott m, Rob h, Justin, Lewis m, John w, Alexis, Gilbert m, Joshua, John s, Thomas d, Simon g, Aaron j, Jessica k, and Valerie h. That's patreon.com/pm. Sorry. Keep hitting me up with questions.

Askaspaceman.com. Askaspaceman@gmail.com. My handle on all social channels is atpalmattsutter, and I will see you next time for more Complete Knowledge of Time and Space.

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