Caoimhín's Content

Today we are going to be looking at the names of some stars and planets, something that I like to do every now and again on this channel. We will assume a view from the countryside because we are going to be looking for, on some occasions, faint stars. I will start by quickly recapping the last time I mentioned the names of stars and planets and a little bit about why the names of stars and planets are can be important and can be so interesting.

There are thousands of other stars with planets going around them. In Stellarium, little spiky circles mark other solar systems, or at least other potential solar systems. There is a piece from I think a few months ago now, mot particularly recently anyway, but in the past I did discus a planet that we believed existed which in fact turns out not to have existed. For the vast majority of these exoplanets, they haven’t been directly observed, rather they’ve been inferred through measurements of the star they orbit. This is starting to change thanks to telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope, but I will get to that next time.

Taking a look at the region of space that the Kepler Space Telescope looked at, there are thousands of systems discovered by this telescope alone. The Kepler Space Telescope measured the light curves of the stars it was pointed at, it was generally looking for planets based on fluctuations in the stars brightness. If a planet comes between you and a star, it will block out a little bit of the light so you see a little bit of a dip in the light curve. If you see this dip regularly you can eventually conclude that there is a planet involved, if you see a regular dip of the same amount each time. This is the transit method of exoplanet detection. There are other methods, such as measuring the wobble of a star caused by massive planets, the radial velocity method. The area viewed by the Kepler Space Telescope is understandably a little bit cluttered so it can be hard to tell, but these are almost all solar systems that were discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope. Thanks to the way that they are named you can see a couple of them weren’t, some were discovered by the 2MASS telescope for example. Some have a string of numbers following a J, this is way of writing the time and date based on astronomical epoch.

Sticking with the Kepler stars, one for example is called Kepler-867 and down here is its planet, the exoplanet Kepler-867-b. I have mentioned in previous videos how these names can be kind of boring. With incremental numbers and the same telescope, these name’s can be repetitive and that can lead to both confusion and boredom. People are generally not as happy listening numbers getting rattled off as they would be if listening to names that were a little bit more understandable in English. The International Astronomical Union has renamed various stars in the past and one that I normally mention is the star and planet that was renamed by Ireland.

The star in question it is up to the North in the constellation Canes Venatici. Under the handle of the Plough or bBig Dipper is Cor Caroli, the brightest star in Canes Venatici. The star we’re looking for is in Canes Venatici, but high above Cor Caroli, much closer to the bottom of the Great Bear, the Tail of Ursa Major. HAT-P-36 is the name that is given to the star, or the name that was given to the star, the designation that it had. HAT-P-36 is a tough one to spot and it is not visible to the naked eye. It was referred to as HAT-P-36, the High Altitude Telescope’s 36th discovered planet and now it is called Tuiren, for the star, and Bran, for the planet. The planet that was called HAT-P-36-b. This star and planets are named after a piece of Irish mythology where a young woman named Tuiren is turned into a dog by an evil fairy, and she gives birth to 2 puppies named Bran and Sceolan. Tuiren is eventually turned back into a human but the dogs are stuck as dogs and become famous hunting dogs for various myths and legends. Canes Venatici is of course the constellation of the hunting dogs.

The competition which that renaming was part of happened in 2019, and this was not the first time that the International Astronomical Union renamed some stars and planets. Thanks to the interest in exoplanets and a a desire to promote exoplanets as an interesting thing to study, they, in many cases, were given new names. Not just in 2019, but in 2019 over 100 different countries around the world, all the member states of the International Astronomical Union, they all got a star and a planet to rename. They were encouraged to use names that came from native languages or heritage languages, not necessarily the most common language in the country. Of course in Ireland we have Irish as our native language and a heritage language for many people. Tuiren and Bran are Irish names so that works.

To give an example from an earlier round of renaming we are going to move a little bit closer to morning time. This brings Pollux into the sky and its planet Thestias. Thestias wasn’t always called Thestias, Thestias, was originally called Pollux-b or Beta Geminorum-b. I was unsure in the video if it was Beta Gemini-b or Beta Geminorum-b, it is Geminorum. This exoplanet was just called -b like exoplanets normally are, but in 2015 the International Astronomical Union took about 20 solar systems, and renamed them in this way. This planet, which was called Pollux-b or Beta Geminorum-b, got renamed as Thestias. The star Pollux already had a common name so we didn’t need to rename that one, but that wasn’t true in every case.

In the video, I began looking up in the constellation of Aries, for what I believed was Mu Ariei. This would be incorrect, it’s really Mu Arietis, usually written μ Ari. I was in fact looking for Mu Arae, usually written μ Ara. I saw Arae and thought Ariei, as the constellation of Ara the Altar is less familiar to me than Aries the Ram. Ara is only visible in the southern celestial hemisphere, not from Ireland. I’m sure anyone who studied Latin in school would have much better time of it, but I looked in the constellation of Aries for a star that was in a whole other constellation. I was still looking for a Mu, and I had to use the actual Greek letter mu or μ, used to represent the m from micro. Stellarium provides the Greek alphabet to maek searching for them easier.

Mu Arae is star and a few planets that were renamed in 2015 by the International Astronomical Union. The star is now called Cervantes after the Spanish author of the book Don Quixote, The other objects in the solar system, there we go, have names inspired by characters from the book. They were discovered in different years but they were named together in 2015, so as I mentioned, Cervantes the stars for the author of the book Don Quixote, then the planets Quixote, Dulcinea, Rocinante and Sancho. I believe that one of them was following Cervantes, another was his horse, another was the woman, the sweet woman he was after. Dulce for sweet and Dulcinea for the woman, I won’t get into the puns and stuff here, but I think Rocinante is also a pun. They are among the ones that were renamed in 2015, and they weren’t all Romance, like this one is. Of course it’s not from Greek mythology, it’s from Spanish literature so it is significantly more modern and more local to Spain. Thestias on the other hand, that’s Latin, and of course Latin is native to Italy but Italian is what’s spoken there now. All of the romance languages are descended from Latin, it’s not as local to any particular place. There were a couple of non-european languages used in 2015 as well. 47 Ursae Majoris is now Chalawan. It got renamed in Thai, along with two of its planets, Taphao Thong and Taphao Kaew. Its third planet, only discovered in 2010 doesn’t seem to have gotten a new name, yet. These are Thai names from Thai mythology so this is something that is at least not European.

In the first 20 or so names that were used there was a lot of Latin, there was a lot of modern languages, the languages that have traditionally dominated science in the West. There is a push to start using more languages, more diverse languages, endangered languages, native languages that have maybe fallen out of favour because more international languages are considered more prestigious. Even as far back in 2015 the International Astronomical Union was using these kinds of names, in the first round of 20 there was at least a couple. In 2019, Ireland got to name a star and planet in Irish, there were around 100 different systems named with loads of names from loads of different languages from all over the world. Then the International Astronomical Union did it again in 2022. I only recently found out about that myself and if you’d like to find out more about it you’ll have to stick with me, stick with this website until my next piece. This is sort of part 1, I will be talking more about the names that were given in 2019 and the names that were given in 2022, the newest round of them, in the next video where I will continue discussing exoplanets and these various solar systems.

I do hope you enjoyed this piece which is sort of the introduction, or a reintroduction, the prequel to the real meat where I eventually will talk about the newest competition in 2022. I hope you enjoyed nonetheless and I hope that you like this piece and that you subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel so you’re more likely to see the next piece. Hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.