FAR OUT on the edge of the solar system, a new planet has been discovered — a lump of ice nine billion miles from the sun, orbiting at the stately rate of once every 560 years. The astronomical community is cooing over the new arrival, which was announced last month, weighing in with a diameter of some 3,000km and a surface temperature of minus 459F. But as with every newborn, there is a dilemma: scientists cannot agree about what (on earth) to call this tenth planet, the youngest —addition to the planetary family.
Currently, the planet still retains the official and unlovely moniker 2003UB313, a name that even its mother couldn’t love. The astronomer who discovered it, Mike Brown, of Caltech, nicknamed the lump Xena, after the semi-clad warrior princess of the American television series, and it has stuck. How is that for a reflection of our cultural impoverishment?
Faced with a vital new discovery in space, the best name we can come up with is that of a kick-boxing war-lady played by Lucy Lawless in a loin cloth. We may as well call it Bruce Forsyth, or Shane Warne, or Vicky Pollard. Come to think of it, Planet Kylie has a a certain appeal.
Naming a planet is no simple process, for the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the body officially in charge of assigning astronomical names, is sensitive to tradition. It does not do jokes, ever since the seventh planet from the sun was named Uranus, unleashing an endless galaxy of schoolboy sniggering.
The IAU rules are firm: the new name must be a single word, 16 characters or fewer, pronounceable, non- offensive, and sufficiently different from the existing name of a minor planet or natural planetary satellite. A planet cannot be named after people or events known for their military or political activities until 100 years after the person died or the event occurred. Names with commercial associations are not permitted, which rules out planet Disney and planet Pepsi. Names of pets are discouraged. (Douglas Adams, in his The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, describes a tenth planet: “The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer’s parrot — there was some tediously heart-warming story attached to this — and that was all very wonderful and lovely.”
In imperial times, naming things was easy. The Victorians, immune to hubris, named what they found after their kings and queens, their heroes and heroines, their benefactors, their battles and the places they had known from home. Today, hemmed in by political sensitivity, racial and gender awareness, we can no longer simply name things after dead, white males. Most of the great names from classical mythology have already been taken. Mike Brown wanted to call his new planet Persephone — in a nod to the planet’s frozen surface that would also adjust the gender balance in the male-dominated solar system — but sadly Persephone was used in 1895 as a name for the 399th known asteroid.
We are simply running out of good names, on earth as in space. Victoria Beckham — unable to find names for her children from literary sources because, by her own admission, she has never read a book — has resorted to making up her own: Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz. Celebrities have led the way in idiotic names: Peaches (Geldof); Moon Unit (Zappa); Zahara (Jolie). But as with children, so with other worlds. Planet Beauregard or Chardonnay may seem cool today, but the planet won’t thank us when it grows up, and a few millennia from now these will seem hopelessly dated.
The last planet to be “discovered”, 75 years ago, was Pluto, named by Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old from Oxford who thought that the distant, dark planet should be named after the Roman god of the underworld. Mike Brown and the IAU will have the final say over the naming of the new sphere, but in an age of democracy it seems only right that the nomenclature should reflect the people’s choice. Among the names so far submitted to New Scientist are: Cerberus, Titan, Bob, Einstein, Mandela, Galileo, Deca, Loki (the Norse God of Mischief) and Pax. Argentine astronomers overwhelmingly favour calling the tenth planet Maradona, on the ground that Diego was the greatest No 10 in history.
Astronomy is not the only branch of science to struggle with nomenclature. So many different living organisms have been discovered that scientists have been forced into extreme lateral thinking. Scientists at Cornell recently named three new slime-mould beetles A. bushi, A. cheneyi and A. rumsfeldi. Apparently this was taken by the White House as a compliment. The insect world now boasts a Heerz tooya, an Apopyllus now and a Pieza rhea. The oceans contain an Ittibittium, a genus of molluscs slightly smaller than those named Bittium. There will be much more of this sort of thing: among insects alone, an estimated nine million species have yet to be named. But one scientist, who discovered a new snail in Fiji, demonstrated his attitude to this branch of wit by calling his discovery Ba humbugi.
The World Conservation Society recently auctioned off the name of a new species of Bolivian monkey for $650,000 to the Golden Palace online casino, with profits to be spent on preserving endangered species. The new name for the animal is Callicebus aureipalatii, Latin for “golden palace”.
This may be one solution to the unnamed planet. If a monkey is worth $650,000, what price an immense lump of ice at the outer edge of the solar system? Having a Planet Gates or a Planet Abramovich seems a small price to pay for the money that would go to astronomical research.
The IAU would doubtless veto any such move, which still leaves us without a proper handle for 2003UB313, alias Xena, hurtling through the void, cold and anonymous. The name must be honest, pithy yet redolent, recalling ancient antiquity as well as popular culture, reflecting our modern beliefs and our classical heritage, the humanity of The Simpsons and the grandeur of the Odyssey. Yes, there is only one possible name for the new heavenly body: Planet Homer.
