New campaign asks every country on Earth to name distant worlds

A new campaign led by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) called IAU100 NameExoWorlds will allow every country in the world to name a star and its exoplanet, Yesterday announced the IAU.

Nearly 100 nations are all registered and ready to participate. The next step will be to organize national campaigns to select names and offer the public an opportunity to vote. The purpose of all this, according to the terms of the IAU, is to "create an awareness of our place in the universe and to think about how the Earth could be perceived by one civilization on another planet. ".

A noble goal, certainly, but the contest has a practical purpose. Astronomers have detected nearly 4,000 exoplanets in the last three decades and almost all of them are stuck to heavy scientific designations such as KMT-2017-BLG-1146Lb, OGLE-2013-BLG-0132Lb and 2MASS J19383260 + 4603591 b, to name only their names. Three.

IAU is the governing body in this area and is launching a new commemoration campaign for its 100th anniversary. This is the second IAU competition of its kind, the first being the NameExoWorlds 2015 campaign, in which 31 exoplanets from 19 planetary systems have been nominated by the public. Or at least, the public was able to vote on a short list of 247 names proposed by astronomy groups, universities, planetariums, and so on. These have in turn been verified by the IAU. The chances of voting for Planet McPlanetface or Cybertron are slim. That said, rather unconventional and strange names were selected in the 2015 competition, including Spe, Orbitar, Poltergeist, Dagon and AEgir.

IAU is doing it again, but on a much larger scale. Each participating country will be assigned a star and its only exoplanet (systems with several known planets have been excluded). In all cases, a designated star can be seen from the country assigned to it and bright enough to be spotted with small telescopes.

The national campaigns will run from June to November 2019, the results being submitted to a validation process by the Steering Committee of the UAI100 NameExoWorlds. The results will be announced in December. Countries not yet registered have until July 30, 2019 to do so.