New Zealand now an exoplanet thanks to Jennie
OPINION with her asteroid, she decided upon the name ‘‘New Zealand’’ and officially submitted the name at the beginning of this year to the IAU Minor Planet Centre.
To date, astronomers have catalogued more than 750,000 asteroids in the asteroid belt but only about 2 per cent of them have been given names.
Mccormick has gazed at stars from her privately owned and operated observatory in the suburb of Farm Cove, Pakuranga, for 20 years. There she links up with the Centre for Backyard Astrophysics and astronomers at Ohio State University, who provided her with her automated telescope.
Since the 1990s, astronomers have discovered some 2000 exoplanets, those orbiting distant stars. Mccormick has helped codiscover 22 of them.
What names are we to give these new exoplanets?
Planets in the Solar System are named after Greek and Roman gods – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Neptune and so on – but there aren’t gods enough to name all the exoplanets.
Since the 1990s, the astronomical union has given exoplanets names like 51Pegasi b, PSR B1620-26 b, or HD 209458. But in response to widespread public clamour, the IAU agreed to give them additional more colourful, popular names.
The union invited astronomical clubs and non-profit organisations with an interest in astronomy to suggest names, specifying there be no names of animals, personal names, places, or events of a commercial, political, military or religious nature.
Thousands of names having been suggested, the IAU set up an elaborate worldwide online voting system to select the most popular names.
Last July, the IAU announced its first 305 officially approved exoplanet names – among them Amateru, Arion, Arkas, Brahe, Dagon, Dimidium, Draugr, Dulcinia, Fortitudo, Galileo, Harriot, Hypatia, Lippershey and Thestias, to name just a few.
Naming stars is a different matter. Ancient Greeks, Romans and Arabs gave proper names to about 200 of the brightest stars such as Sirius, Canopus, Rigil, Arctaurus and Vega. Trouble is, those same stars have other names too.
For example, stars of the constellation Pleiades are known in England as the Seven Sisters, in Turkey as Ulker, in Iran as Parveen, in Japan as Subaru, to the Aztecs as Tianquiztli and to the Maori as Matariki.
To make sure all stargazers are reading off the same page, the IAU occasionally publishes lists of approved star names. Last July’s list of 98 brighter stars ran from Acamar, Achermar and Achird, to Zosnar and Zuben-el-akribi.
Mccormick’s asteroid joins other New Zealand celestial features, including a crater and high mountain on the Moon named after Ernest Rutherford and Ed Hillary, and a crater on Mercury named after painter Frances Hodgkins.