Why do Planets these days have the most stupidest names?

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

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Because we’re discovering potentially thousands to millions of exoplanets, we need efficient names, so for, say, WASP-96b, it was the 96th star system cataloged by the WASP survey, and iirc we start at b for the naming convention because the star is given the undeclared “a” as it’s designation

There are lots of exoplanets with proper names, though, [here’s the list](wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proper_names_of_exoplanets)

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because you’ve got Saturn, with 1x Saturn rings. Then you’ve got MegaSaturn with 10x Saturn rings. Then GigaSaturn with 50x Saturn rings…

How many more descriptors can you go up before you run out and have to call a planet “MegaUltraGigaExtraSaturn3”?