[X] My Assistant

[dvandorn]

Excellent. Hopefully more to come out of the dataset,

As something of an aside, I'm thinking that we may need to re-think the final naming convention formula for extrasolar planets. There are now hundreds (eventually thousands?) of planets, around a whole slew of stars, all named Keplernnna, where (from what I can tell) "nnn" is the numerical designation based on order of discovery and "a" is an alphabetic sub-class indicator.

I've got to think that there is a naming convention out there that will eventually be emplaced where the name of the planet somehow references its home star, not just the device used to discover it. I mean, right now if I came up and said that I have exciting new information about Kepler 367b (to pull a number out of the hat), you would more than likely have to look up a table of Kepler planets to figure out which one I was talking about and where in the Galaxy it was located...

I'm also not a huge fan of the naming convention used for non-probe discoveries. It's better than the Kepler planets in that the planets are named for their stars, but the designators for individual planets in a system are in order of discovery, not in order out from the star. Granted, we can't see how many planets some stars have with current sensitivities, but I figure that if we need to amend our planet designations as time goes on and renumber planets as we find new ones within solar systems, well, we've done sillier things. (Hey, I also think that the rings of Saturn ought to be redesignated based on distance from the planet, not on order of discovery, but that's certainly another discussion... )

-the other Doug (with my shield, not yet upon it)