Schlep's in a name?

Sunday, July 31, 2005


So a giant lump of rock, originally photographed two years ago, has just been announced as the 10th planet of our solar system. Further away from the Sun than Pluto and with an even more off-plane orbit, it has ignited a raging debate (albeit a pretty geeky one) over what precisely constitutes a planet, and what constitutes simply a large asteroid.

My attention, however, was quickly captured by the discovering team's leader, Michael Brown, and his proposal of what the new planet's name should be:


Xena.


Yes, that's as in "Xena, Warrior Princess," i.e. the TV show, not "Xena, Please let it be whatever the TV character was named after."


What's their logic? "We have always wanted to name something Xena." Way to think that one through!

I'm baffled! Don't astronomers have some sort of greater duty to science, too? Isn't there some sort of Hippocratic Astronomer's Oath that you take when you're girded with your first telescope?

It's only a PLANET! Way to put five seconds of thought into it and really name it something deserving of a celestial body that's been around for a few billion years, and will be for a few billion more!









All the other planets are named after Greek and Roman gods, but we decided to break with the tradition that's been running for a few thousand years. Just because. And really- why stop at Xena? If you're gonna throw tradition to the wind, don't hold back! How about simply "Scantily-Clad Dominating Female?" Or maybe "Michael Brown Discovered Me?"



Let's think for the long term. Schoolchildren eighty years from now are certainly going to look at a diagram of the solar system and follow the pattern: Jupiter, king of the gods, the largest and most dominating planet. Mars, god of war, bright red in the sky. Neptune, the brilliant blue planet, king of the seas. Mercury, the fleet-footed, whose orbit is so quick around the sun. And finally, Xena... the planet who galavants about the cosmos kicking ass, spouting witty one-liners and having a totally ambiguous relationship with Venus.

Greeks and Romans? Pssssshhh. Who's gonna remember all that pre-historic mumbo-jumbo, those toga-clad "astronomers" with no telescopes, rowing their Hellenic butts around? I'll tell you who they'll remember: Sam Raimi, that's who! Lucy Lawless, in that tough-as-nails but enchanting camp role! That's timeless!


We all know that the nerds in high school are the ones who'll grow up to be running things, and to an extent we all accepted that... but that doesn't mean they won't be EXTREME DORKS about it.


I can sort of understand why this happens. It's really the only thing that astronomers get- physicists get to blow stuff up, engineers get to erect giant phallic monuments... astronomers get to name stuff. That's it. Even the hands-on astronomy NASA practiced with the comet impactor recently is as glamorous as it gets. So when this dude gets his chance to name something, to really scratch himself into the records, I guess he has to jump at it.

I suppose there is a small chance that he's really thinking about humanity. "Well, you know, I briefly thought of naming it Sysiphus, or even Nyx, but then I thought, you know, I really, really, REALLY liked that TV show, and maybe this will help people in the future remember what a great syndicated run the chronicles of the Warrior Princess had in 20th-century television."


Has ever there been a scientist more clearly out of his league?


So I thought, doesn't there have to be some council of scientists someplace that judges names for celestial stuff? Isn't there a congress of smart people, some panel of brainiacs that has at least a tiny chance of shooting this down? A table full of drunken poker players, even, with, I don't know, the tiniest amount of pattern-recognition ability? They teach this stuff on Sesame Street!








I was relieved to see that this council does exist: The International Astronomical Union.

We'll just have to wait and see what they come up with.




Now, I realize I've spent most of this writing making fun of Professor Brown for what I believe to be his childish choice of proposed name, but here's another tidbit-

On his very own Caltech website, there's documentation of another celestial body the same team discovered: 2003 VB-12, or Sedna (the Inuit ocean goddess). On this page, the team discusses the very same issue of planethood vs. asteroidness.

They decide that Sedna, only slightly smaller than Pluto, is not a planet. But they also decide that by their definition, technically, Pluto isn't a planet, either! The conclusion Brown and Pals comes to:

"We are thus left with a final concept of the word planet. Every object in the solar system quite naturally can be classified as either a solitary individual or a member of a large population. The individuals are planets. The populations are not. This definition fits the historical desire to distinguish between asteroids and planets, and this definition fits all of the requirements of scientific motivation."

This completely rules out 2003 UB313 (er... Xena) as a legitimate planet, since it's a component of the Kuiper Belt, a large mass of asteroid-esque bodies out in the Pluto neighborhood.

But, you know, we didn't realize a couple years ago when we wrote that we would actually get to be the ones to name the next planet! Fortunately, they threw in the disclaimer, "...we would like nothing better than to find some object which defies everything that we currently think we know and forces us to completely rethink fundamental questions like 'what is a planet.'" CYA, check.

So when Xena came around, they were pretty quick to throw all that individuals / populations crap to the solar wind: "It is definitely bigger than Pluto, and I would say it counts out as the 10th planet."

Funny, since that same Caltech Sedna site of his dismisses the "bigger than Pluto" criteria:

"Why is Pluto the cutoff size? Is there really a big enough difference in size between Pluto and Sedna and Quaoar that one should be called a planet while the others are not? The scientific answer remains a resounding no."

I call shenanigans.



Pretty fortunate you decided to go back to the "bigger than Pluto" argument just in time to discover number 10. And with the sighting of another planetoid, 2003 EL61, that turns out to be 3/4 Pluto's size (also a Kuiper Belt orbital), it's painfully apparent that way out there, there's a ton of stuff that size floating around.


"Get out your pens. Start re-writing textbooks today," Brown says. Sounds like a guy who is totally dedicated to science solely for the furtherance of mankind.





Way to go.

posted by Scotty 2-shots at 12:56 PM