Name Those Moons!

One day, some time before I retired as the director of the Kirkpatrick Planetarium of Science Museum Oklahoma, I was giving a talk to a group of students. After the talk, one of the students asked if I had ever discovered a constellation. Side note: constellations aren’t “discovered” as if they are a thing waiting to be found. They are pictures imagined in the stars, much like a cloud might look like a dog or a turtle. Every culture imagined such patterns in the stars, often quite different from those of any other culture. But, yes, I have imagined some of my own star pictures.

The point of her question, I believe, was whether I had ever made an astronomical discovery or, perhaps described and named some new phenomena. I have done both, but always after some else first discovered or named it, unbeknownst to me.

Now, you have an opportunity to do what I haven’t: be the first person to name a denizen of the astronomical zoo. Five moons of our largest planet, Jupiter, need names, and the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the governing body of all things astronomical, is giving the public the opportunity to name them.

Image Credit: International Astronomical League

But there are rules. The IAU has criteria for naming moons and other features on all the plants. IAU criteria for Jovian moons requires that Jupiter's moons be “after characters from Roman or Greek mythology who were either descendants or lovers of the god known as Jupiter (Roman) or Zeus (Greek).”

Any student of Greek or Roman mythology knows this leaves a lot of possibilities. Jupiter/Zeus was a rather randy deity. He had many lovers, and offspring by them, much to the consternation of his wife Juno/Hera.

Since Jupiter sits at the outer edge of the Asteroid Belt, it has many captured moons. Some orbit prograde, in the same direction that Jupiter rotates, but there are also many moons in a retrograde orbit, opposite the rotation. Moons in a prograde orbit must end in ‘a’ and retrograde moons must end in ‘e.’ Names can’t be too similar to other moon names, can’t be offensive in any language and can be no more than 16 characters long.

The Jupiter moon-naming contest ends April 15, so hurry. Details of the contest are at https://www.iau.org/news/announcements/detail/ann19010/.

On the first Tuesday of each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. On the following day, I post that same column to my blog page.

This is reprinted by permission form the Oklahoman and www.newsok.com.