The Space Thread

I would prefer keeping with the Theme Naming the other planets have (Greco-Roman gods, mostly Roman)

Janus could be a good one, the Roman god of transition, beginnings and endings. I don't think it's been used already, though I can't actually find a list of named planets/moons/stuff.

Janus is a moon of Saturn.

Plouton might be good, since it was the source of Pluto

edited 23rd Jan '16 11:35:37 AM by eyebones

Apollo

Sod... What names haven't we used?

Hestia,she left the other gods behind.

Bacchus. he's one of the cool ones.

Nyx, goddess of night. Seems better than the god of light, considering how far it is from the sun.

If it turned out to be a rogue capture, Mithras or Isis.

edited 23rd Jan '16 3:33:03 PM by Artificius

There's no planet or asteroid Hercules, as far as I know.

But there is a constellation. Which means that the name is probably already considered used.

Clearly, it is time for a new tradition. We could stick to naming the trans-Uranic bodies for Disney characters. Mickey, Dumbo, Cinderella, and so on.

Bacchus is the only one of the twelve olympians not to have anything named after them yet as far as I know.

Though my vote would go to Minerva. Sod the asteroid.

Personally, I'd just move onto a new mythology. Horus, Odin, ect.

Hodor, the blind brother of Baldur? Might be too obscure for a major planet, though.

edited 24th Jan '16 8:32:15 PM by Artificius

I think most people might associate that one with Game of Thrones.

What about naming the planet Maia,unless that one already taken?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maia_(mythology)

Or Fortuna?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortuna

edited 25th Jan '16 6:57:29 AM by Ultimatum

Discar: Nyx is taken by a moon of Pluto.

What about Yuggoth?

I vote for Yuggoth or Oneiroi

Stellar parenting: Making new stars by 'adopting' stray cosmic gases: "Astronomers have for the first time found young populations of stars within globular clusters that have apparently developed courtesy of star-forming gas flowing in from outside of the clusters themselves. This method stands in contrast to the conventional idea of the clusters' initial stars shedding gas as they age in order to spark future rounds of star birth."

The Milky Way's clean and tidy galactic neighbor: "Many galaxies are chock-full of dust, while others have occasional dark streaks of opaque cosmic soot swirling in amongst their gas and stars. However, the subject of this new image, snapped with the OmegaCAM camera on ESO's VLT Survey Telescope in Chile, is unusual — the small galaxy, named IC 1613, is a veritable clean freak! IC 1613 contains very little cosmic dust, allowing astronomers to explore its contents with great clarity."

Going back to names for the potential planet. I think Persephone/Proserpina is another possibility.

Moon was produced by a head-on collision between Earth and a forming planet: "The moon was formed from a violent, head-on collision between the early Earth and a 'planetary embryo' called Theia approximately 100 million years after the Earth formed, almost 4.5 billion years ago."

Monstrous cloud boomerangs back to our galaxy: "New Hubble telescope observations suggest that a high-velocity gas cloud was launched from the outer regions of our own galaxy around 70 million years ago. Now, the cloud is on a return collision course and is expected to plow into the Milky Way's disk in about 30 million years. Astronomers believe it will ignite a spectacular burst of star formation then."

Hasn't that moon thing been known for a while?

It's probably that they've reached a higher standard of proof and framework for how it happened then they had previously.

Yep, the giant impact hypothesis, which gets points for being one of the coolest names I've ever heard for scientific stuff.