What’s in a Name When You’re Just a Plutoid?

July 17, 2008

Composer Gustav Holtz’s magnificent orchestral suite The Planets has seven individual compositions for each of the solar system’s planets. There is Mars the Bringer of War, Jupiter the Bringer of Jollity, and Neptune the Mystic. Each movement is intended to convey ideas and emotions associated with the human psyche.

But would Holtz have been inspired to do compositions for planets with names like Quaoar, Eris, and Makemake?

The largest of the icy dwarf worlds on the outer rim of our solar system are being assigned names by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). The astronomers who discovered them have the right to pick a name and get it officially sanctioned by the IAU.

You’ll remember that the IAU recently categorized these Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) as Plutoids in a miserably failed PR attempt to placate Pluto huggers.

Pluto remains the only KBO that is named after a Roman god in accordance with the seven other major planets. Pluto is the Roman god of the Kingdom of the Dead – not the Walt Disney cartoon dog as so many school children think. The first two letters PL also are the initials of the astronomer who inaugurated the search for Pluto in 1915, Percival Lowell.

When Pluto’s moon Charon was discovered in 1976 I was hoping that the astronomer who uncovered it, James Christy, would call it Cerberus after the god of the underworld’s three-headed dog. A planet named after a dark lord and his pet monster was sure to captivate childrens’ imaginations. But nope, Christy has a wife named Charlene and her nickname is “Char.” so he was thinking of her when he picked Charon, the boatman who ferried dead souls to Pluto across the river Styx.

When astronomers found Pluto’s much smaller pair of moons in 2006, I though of names like Abbot and Costello, Thelma and Louise, or Beavis and Butthead. These would be hip and cute, but terribly inappropriate for the IAU crowd.

The New Horizons team who made the discovery using Hubble Space Telescope toyed with dric and drac (not Frick and Frack) the coins the Romans put on the eyes of the deceased to pay Charon for the river crossing.

Instead, the names Nix and Hydra were picked because they are the initials of the Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft.  How cheesy can you get? In mythology Hydra is a nine-headed serpent-monster, and Nix is the goddess of darkness and night and the mother of Charon.

Caltech astronomer Mike Brown has had the fun of naming the other KBOs he has discovered. The KBO designated UB313, later found to be slightly larger than Pluto, was Nicknamed Xena after the television Warrior Princess from the mid 1990s. A small satellite companion was named Gabriella, Xena’s sidekick.

The names had to go because of their high “giggle factor.” In fact, I got one slightly risqué e-mail from an amateur astronomer: “The size estimates are continuously changing [for Xena].  Xena seems to be breathing or something.  Maybe not as exciting as Lucy Lawless, but interesting nonetheless.”

In 2006 the IAU renamed UB313 Eris and Dysnomia, as selected by Brown. Eris is named after the Greek goddess of strife and discord. Dysnomia is Eris's daughter, the goddess of lawlessness. Brown thinks the names are appropriate considering that the KBO’s discovery was instrumental in demoting Pluto to dwarf planet status.

In 2002 Brown discovered another big KBO designated 2002 LM60. In preparing a press release on this I wrote to Mike an urged him to give it a nickname so it became a place in people’s imaginations. What would the Star Wars films be without the exotic worlds of Hoth, Tatooine, and Dagobah? Conversely, who, if anyone, remembers the planet Altair IV in the 1956 classic film Forbidden Planet?

A day later Brown e-mailed me to report his name selection. I slowly read it off the computer screen: Q-U-A-O-A-R. Huh?? I wondered.  Sorry, you’d never find this planet in the Star Wars galaxy.

Quaoar (pronounced KWAH-o-ar) is the name of an asexual creation deity of the Native American Tongva people who lived in Southern California.

Internet chatter soon bubbled up:

“Quaoar? It’s a name only Barbara Walters could pronounce.”

“Quaoar? I don’t like pronouncing something that sounds like I just finished having dental surgery.”

“Quaoar? Probably a bunch of astronomers were playing Scrabble and they ran out of consonants.”

To keep his naming record consistently imaginative -- if not unpronounceable -- Brown has named a third KBO, formerly know as 2005 FY9. Ready? It’s called Makemake, after a god in the culture of Easter Island. This was officially sanction by the IAU just recently.

The Next plutoid on the list for a name is 2003 EL61. Brown has nicknamed it Santa. But there has been ongoing battle between Brown and Spanish astronomer Jose-Luis Ortiz Moreno as to who rightfully saw the KBO first.

I say, let the astronomer with the coolest planetary name win. 

Photos, top to bottom: NASA/Adolf Schaller; NASA; GFDL