Caoimhín's Content

Today we are going to continue looking at the names of stars and planets, some of the newer names given to stars and planets by the International Astronomical Union. Last time, I mentioned the planets that were named by the 2015 push for the naming of planets, and in 2015 it was just a handful of objects that were renamed. 20 or so solar systems got renamed or named, in some cases only partly named. In some cases the planets got named but the star already had a name so that was fine. Then, in 2019, the International Astronomical Union did it again, and this time well every country that was a member of the International Astronomical Union got a chance to name a star and its planets, which is a lot of countries.

The IAU technically includes more than just countries. We’ll begin by looking for a star which not visible from the northern hemisphere, and that’s absolutely sensible. We will begin with the star Uklun, which is the word for “we” in the native language of the Pitcairn Islanders. Uklun is always the name of the star, but the word is sometimes written “aklen”. The word “we” is also known as the second person plural pronoun, and in english there is only one. “We” in English can mean “me and you” or “me and others”. In the language of the Pitcairn Islands, known as Pitkern or Pitcairnese, there seems to be two, with “uklun” or “wi” taking the meaning of “me and others” and the seperate word “hami” meaning “you and I”. This makes “uklun” a second person exclusive pronoun, excluding the listener or addressee and “hami” an inclusive second person pronoun. This may be uncommon in Europe, but it is common in the Pacific Ocean.

The Pitcairn Islands are a small group of islands down in the Southern Hemisphere of the Pacific Ocean. Although Pitkern does have part of its origins in English, it was also influenced by the nearby language of Tahitian. The Pitcairn Islands are not however as far south as I though in the video, being much closer to the Pacific equator than they are to the Antarctic or Southern Ocean. One of the main points to this renaming was to highlight exoplanets, so of course there is an exoplanet here as well. Along with the star Uklun we have the planet Leklsullun. I do attempt to pronounce this in the video, but I absolutely don’t speak Pitcairnese, so I hope my attempt wasn’t too poor. Leklsullun is the word for children or little children in the Pitcairn language. I hope you’ve heard of the Pitcairn Islands, but if you haven’t I also wouldn’t be surprised, they’re not a country that gets mentioned very often. Technically, they are a British Overseas Territory, but the International Astronomical Union extended naming opportunities to some territories, including the Organized and Unincorporated U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.

The IAU advised the prioritization of native languages for these names, in those countries that have existing minority native languages. The star Bubup, is one such example. I was not confident in my pronunciation of this name either, because this is a word from a native Australian aboriginal language, Boonwurrung. I was not very confident in my pronunciation of the name of the language either, nor the name of the exoplanet Yanyan. Boonwurrung is one of a great deal of native Australian language, and these are the words for boy and girl, or a male child and a female child. Many of these languages are understudied, and it is often difficult to draw the line between a language and a dialect. Commonly however, the “rr” is these languages is pronounced similar to the “rr” in Spanish, a trilled rhotic sound, and “ny” is usually pronounced similar to “ñ” in Spanish, a palatal nasal. Of course the, one of the biggest, I think still the biggest, language in Australia, is English. There are various other languages from other parts of the world becoming popular in Australia as lots of people go to Australia from all over the world, but there are lots of Native Australian Aboriginal languages as well. Most importantly, many of them are still extant, still alive. Unfortunately, many of them are endangered. Languages can be endangered in a similar way to a species can be endangered and languages can go extinct in a similar way as well. Thankfully, there are native Australian languages that are still spoken, still getting taught, still getting passed down from generation to generation.

The Australian committee involved with the naming of this star and planet, whoever decided to propose and approve this name, they followed the International Astronomical Unions instructions to use these more native languages, rather than languages that aren’t spoken there with much historicity. It’s the same for a lot of the new names of stars and planets, for example a lot of the names of stars and planets from Canada or from the Americas more generally, they come from the First Nations or Native American Indigenous populations. I’m not entirely up to date what exactly the correct terms for native or indigenous groups are, but I do know that this push, the 100 stars named in 2019, put an incredible amount of languages on the sort of astronomical map. There are languages that have never been used for astronomy in an international context before that now have stars and planets named in them.

There has been another push for the naming of new stars, as I mentioned the International Astronomical Union in 2022 grabbed another few solar systems to be renamed. These solar systems were special in a different way, not that they were particularly recently discovered. They are stars with planets, they are exoplanets, and that’s of course very interesting on its own. This next one’s in Canes Venatici as well, that’s nice, a neighbour perhaps to Tuiren and Bran. This planet is HAT-P-12, or it was called HAT-P-12. Now it has a Hungarian name and again I don’t speak Hungarian, but this star is Komondor. Luckily, this particular name has been nativized into English. Komondor is the name of the star and Puli is the name of the planet. Those are breeds of dog, and so those names get used in English for the specific Hungarian breeds. Much like the name Weimaraner being used without the German pronunciation, these Hungarian words referring to dog breeds get used in English. This fits because HAT-P-12 is in the constellation Canes Venatici, the constellation of hunting dogs, so course it’s Hungarian terms for dogs in the same constellation as the solar system that has its name from Irish mythological story about dogs.

I was briefly taken by the coincidence that this solar system happened to be in same constellation and was also named after dogs, but of course the names come from dog-related things because it’s in this constellation of the hunting dogs. Hungarian of course is a big language, it’s a European language, an official EU language, and it’s a national language. Of course it’s still great to see it in an astronomical context. Only a few, about 20 solar systems, were used in this slightly newer batch of naming. The Stellarium software hasn’t caught up with the 2022 names yet. You may have seen in the previous video that Tuiren and Bran were already recognized by the system, as are Bubup and Yanyan, all from 2019, where as Komondor and Puli from 2022 don’t seem to have been recognized by the system as of yet.

Due to the Stellarium system not being fully up-to-date on all of these discoveries, I can’t search for them with their new names. Instead, I need to use the identifiers they have been provided, for example GJ-436. This is another solar system and Stellarium already knows it’s a solar system. The exoplanet in question was apparently discovered in 2004, but in 2022 this star and planet was also named by Spain. You may remember from last time that Spain has a famous national work of literature represented in the sky by the star Cervantes and its planets Quixote, Rocicante, Sanco and Dulcinea. This star, GJ-436, is now called Gar. Gar is the star and the planet going round it is Su, Gar and Su. Su in particular is tough for me to pronounce because it’s Basque. In Basque, or Euskara, there is a sound written with an “s” and a sound written with a “z”. The sound written with a “z” is almost identical to the English “s” sound, a laminal sibilant. The Basque “s” is a different sound, an apical sibilant, almost in between an English “s” and the “th” sound at the start of “theory”. Basque is a European language but it’s not a national language. It does have some recognition in Navarre, in the state in Spain in which it is a native language. Basque, or at least its family, have been in Europe longer than any of the Indo-European languages including Irish and its Celtic ancestors. The ancestors of Basque were in Europe before the ancestors of Latin, which lead to Spanish and French, even got here. I like languages, I’m not a huge expert on them but I hope it comes across that I am a fan of languages, and Basque getting a star and a planet named in its language is a nice piece of recognition for a language that isn’t the national language of a country.

A few of these other GJ stars have been given names in this batch of renaming as well, as these are some of the stars and planets that the James Webb Space Telescope is looking at. The James Webb Space Telescope is a huge leap forward in terms of our capacity to look at these planets. Su was discovered by the radial velocity method way back in 2004, long before the James Webb Space Telescope was launched. We are looking at it again because the James Webb Space Telescope has the capacity to actually look at these planets. It can record wavelengths of light that are after bouncing off of the planet itself, allowing it to look directly at the planet. That is going to hopefully lead to some major discoveries in the near future and hopefully it will lead to even more planets named in languages that aren’t national languages, but still important heritage languages and native languages, such as Basque, in the future.

I hope that you enjoyed this sort of part 2, this follow-on for the newer International Astronomical Union competition naming of the stars and planets. Hopefully there will be another one in the future, and hopefully I’ll be able to preempt the next one and talk about it before it’s over. This most recent one finished in December 2022, so I’m a few years late. Hopefully I will be early for the next one and if you would like to be at least on time for my next piece it would help if you subscribed to this website and my YouTube channel. Hopefully, I’ll see you back here next time.