[X] My Assistant

[naming_asteroids]

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

According to the MPC:

This discoverer is accorded the privilege of suggesting a name for his/her discovery. The discoverer has the privilege for a period of ten years following the numbering of the object.

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!

[David]

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

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.

[Jyril]

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.

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.