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Posted by: naming_asteroids Jun 17 2006, 07:17 AM

...you can do it! There are hundreds of unnamed asteroids for which the discoverer's naming rights have expired.

According to the MPC:

As of 2006 June 1, all asteroids with numbers below (7041) that have not been named are eligible to be named by any member of the public. The list is here:

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/lists/NumberedMPs.html


And for the names:

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/info/HowNamed.html contains a list of rules.

http://www.ss.astro.umd.edu/IAU/csbn/ and http://www.ss.astro.umd.edu/IAU/csbn/mpnames.shtml contain more rules and a contact email for the CSBN - remember, an individual/group should not submit more than two names per two months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is always a good starting point for a name hunt. Try to find something connected to the discovery circumstances or the object's orbit. Remember to write a good (yet short) citation.


Happy naming!

Posted by: David Jun 19 2006, 06:26 PM

How about natural satellites? There seem to be a few that have been forgotten and "left on the shelf" by the IAU. For instance, why hasn't S/2000 J11 been named yet? With the moons raining down thick and fast these last few years, I can understand a wait of a year or two. But six years? Has there been some difficulty about resolving its orbital elements? Or has some astronomer got a cryptic grudge against poor S/2000 J11? There's a mystery here.

Posted by: Michael Capobianco Jun 19 2006, 07:33 PM

Can someone confirm that just anyone can submit asteroid names and have them accepted by the IAU?

Michaelc

Posted by: volcanopele Jun 19 2006, 08:31 PM

Yeah, reading through the rules, I don't see where it is suggested that anyone can suggest a name after ten years. It seems to be implied by "The discoverer has the privilege for a period of ten years following the numbering of the object", but one could also take it to mean that if an object goes without naming after 10 years after being number, it won't get a name. In fact, that is my impression after reading through the rules as linked by "naming_asteroids".

Posted by: Jyril Jun 19 2006, 09:58 PM

It doesn't seem to have been recovered, so it is probably lost and has therefore remained unnamed. AFAIK according to current IAU rules, a moon cannot be named before it has been recovered (meaning some of the moons discovered by Voyagers wouldn't have been named in the 1980s or 1990s).

It is (if it exists and its orbital parameters are even roughly correct) the only new member of the Himalia prograde satellite group. A few other new satellites were originally listed as Himalia group members, but subsequent observations have shown them to be members of other retrograde satellite groups (Ananke, Carme, or Pasiphae; Themisto and Carpo are lone members of their own highly inclined, prograde groups). Some of the other, yet unnamed satellites discovered in 2003 have been recovered, so eventually they will be named too.

Posted by: David Jun 20 2006, 12:09 AM

Poor little lost moon! Are there any others like it?

Posted by: ljk4-1 Jun 20 2006, 02:13 PM

Sounds like someone is trying to make a buck off this ala the
International Star Registry.

Hey, if you can get people to shell out $40 for some utterly obscure
star in the Fornax cluster and name it after Aunt Matilda, why not a
much closer and just as obscure little space rock?

The astronomers will complain, the public will think "There go those
humorless, geeky science types", and the said company will laugh
all the way to the bank.

Ah, the human condition.

Posted by: Jyril Jun 20 2006, 02:59 PM

There's a whole swarm of Saturnian moons that don't exist.

They're listed in the http://www.nineplanets.org/newsats.html website (see the pre-2000 facts section; note that S/1981 S 14 turned out to be real and is now called Pallene). S/2004 S 3, S/2004 S 4, and S/2004 S 6 which were discovered by Cassini are probably just clumps of material in the F ring; so are likely the new "satellites" discovered in 1995.

Looks like the most famous of them, Themis, isn't listed there. It was supposed to orbit near Titan and Hyperion. There's also moons reported orbiting Mercury and Venus. The satellite of Venus was named Neith. Like Pallene, some of the moons listed in the link may turn out to be real, but Themis and the moons around Mercury and Venus are known not to exist.

Posted by: ljk4-1 Jun 20 2006, 03:08 PM

The Venusians who say "Neith!"

I recall the big hullaballoo over the "discovery" of the moon of Mercury by
the Mariner 10 science team in 1974, until they figured out it was Canopus.