Like, A Planet with Rings 100x larger than Saturns? “J1401b”. Why Do Planets these days have the most stupidest names?
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Wouldn’t you try a systematic approach if you had to name 1000000 celestial bodies?
Honestly I think there are just too many to keep track of, so using weird letter and number combinations are the best way to index them all.
They appear to me names making cataloguing easier. The letters and numbers will refer to different details of the body. This is a very practical name. A stupid name for a planet would be Ham Sandwich, Trout Poo or Sticky Emissions.
Well, basically because naming things is hard. We’ve already found 5000+ exoplanets, and many more are to come. The IAU manages names of astronomical objects, and mostly they prefer formulaic designations.
However they are holding perioding naming contests for them. You can get a group to participate in the next round, just be aware they get a -ton- of submissions, so odds are it won’t be you.
https://www.nameexoworlds.iau.org/
Because of the sheer quantity of them, and all the cool names have already been picked thousands of years ago.
Astronomers have been looking at the sky for a long time and it turns out there is a bunch of stuff out there. Too much in fact to be giving all those objects names from Greek mythology. There are more than 173 million catalogued objects of which around 84 million are stars. Of course we don’t know in advance which stars are going to have planets discovered around them, and it would really be helpful if the name of the planet in some way related to the name of the star. It would make things way easier to figure out.
So when you have a star named “J1407” because numbering is a decent way of keeping track of a huge number of similar objects, what do you call an object found orbiting that star? You call it J1407b because the “b” is a way to indicate it is a secondary object in the system of the “J1407” star. If they found another planet it would be called “J1407c” and anyone coming across that name could figure out that it is the second object orbiting that star.
They don’t have “names” as such. They have a place holder designation. Your example of J1401 means
J1401 is the star
The lower case “b” denotes it as a planetary body around that star.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Sorry am on mobile.
There’s currently 5090 confirmed exoplanets and 8912 more candidates. There’s more discovered every day. With that kind of volume, it’s not worth the effort that coming up with that many “cool” names would take, so they’ve resorted to basically an indexing/cataloging system rather than actual “names”.
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/discovery/exoplanet-catalog/
Also consider that these names, like “J1401b” are kind of like placeholders for the sake of easier indexing. If we do a bunch of research and end up establishing a base there or something, it will very likely be given an “actual” name.
What makes those names stupid? The purpose of a name is to identify something. When you have a significantly large amount of things to identify its usually easier to have a systematic approach, especially when the majority of people who will be referring to those items are doing so for scientific reasons.
Astronomers these days discover thousands of new planets. Nobody has the time or the patience to think about giving them all unique names, given that we know very little about most of them.
For example, you have the planet WASP-43b. The WASP just tells you that it was discovered by the WASP program. The b tells you its the closest planet to the star (a is the star, c would be the next closest, and so on
Why do some of them have really long names like J04414489+2301513?
Because those are coordinates. With those numbers, an astronomer could find that star at any time of year.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS_J04414489%2B2301513](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2MASS_J04414489%2B2301513)
Look at the Wikipedia page for any of these objects, and compare the Right Ascencion and Declination to the name
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