![]() ![]() “My sense is that we are so used to calling it 51 Peg b, that it would be difficult and confusing to change now. Saturn: Named after Saturn (Cronus), god of agriculture and time. “Only time will tell if astronomers adopt these names,” says Wright. Named after Jupiter (Zeus), the king of the gods, because the planet is the largest of all. The IAU’s contest didn’t involve many members of the exoplanet community, he says, and academic journals may not take note of the results of a public outreach event. Jason Wright, an astronomer and astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State University, doesn’t expect the new names to catch on. ![]() “I’m fascinated to know whether the astronomical community will adopt or ignore these names,” says Greg Laughlin at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has set up a page on prediction site Metaculus for people to weigh in with their best guesses. ![]() Another five received names in honour of Miguel de Cervantes’s famous novel The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, submitted by the Planetarium of Pamplona in Spain. Six stars and planets were named by the Royal Netherlands Association for Meteorology and Astronomy for famous people of science like Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, and Hans Lippershey, a spectacle-maker credited with building the first refracting telescope. ![]()
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