Like, A Planet with Rings 100x larger than Saturns? “J1401b”. Why Do Planets these days have the most stupidest names?
In: 0
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.
Latest Answers