An Idea For Naming Planets, Stars, and Galaxies

The two alien planets are officially known as Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, a nod to the instrument that detected them, NASA’s prolific Kepler space telescope. […]  All of this is standard exoplanet-naming procedure — star name plus letter. But the Kepler mission isn’t the only planet-hunting project working today […] so there are also alien worlds out there with names like HD 171028 b and MOA-2007-BLG-192-L b.

— Do Newfound Alien Planets Need Better Names?

I agree with the idea that we need a new way to name celestial bodies that helps the public feel a bit more in touch with the cosmos. We have two major problems with that now: the vast number of objects, and the limited number of thematic names we’ve traditionally used.

One of the joys most of us had learning about our Solar System is that the names of the larger objects come from mythology. In fact, they pretty much came exclusively from Greek and Roman mythology until we started running out of names from those pantheons. We’ve branched out with new discoveries which is why some of the newest members of the dwarf planet realm have drawn from other cultures (e.g. Haumea, Makemake).

If we are having difficulty keeping up with our small little planetary system and a smattering of nearby stars and galaxies, how in the world are we realistically going to name the thousands of new planets that are only now finding themselves on the rolls? Sure, we could continue with cataloging nomenclature, but I think there is another way that is able to distinctly label each body for cataloging, do it automatically (with some human editing), and make it pronounceable for the public so special cases can be easily identified.

We assemble a list of consonant phonemes and a set of vowel phonemes, for example:

CONSONANTS:

• B (Bed)
• D (Did)
• F (Four)
• G (Give)
• H (Hello)
• J (Jail)
• K (Kale)
• L (Lamb)
• M (Muon)
• N (Nova)
• P (Pop)
• R (Roll)
• S (Star)
• T (Tape)
• V (Vote)
• W (Water)
• Q (chutzpah e.g. Qutzpah)
• Y (Yes)
• Z (Zoo)
• Þ (thank e.g. Þank)
• Р(this e.g. Ðis)
• X (ship e.g. Xip)
• C (lurch e.g. lurC)
• Ж ( vision e.g. viЖion)
• ‘ (hawai‘i)

VOWELS:

• AH (hurrAH)
• AY (sAY)
• EH (mEH)
• EE (beam e.g. bEEm)
• AI (hive e.g. hAIv)
• IH (kick e.g. kIHck)
• OH (row e.g. rOH)
• OW (cOW)
• OO (spOOn)
• UH (enough e.g. enUHf)

This gives us 25 consonant sounds and 10 vowel sounds. If we consider a syllable as being always constructed with one consonant sound followed by one vowel sound, this gives us 250 unique combinations right out of the box. Every time we add another syllable, we increase our constructed word possibilities exponentially, thus:

• 250 1-syllable words e.g. “LOI”
• 62,500 2-syllable words e.g. “LOONUH”
• 15.6 million 3-syllable words e.g. “PUHLOOTOH”
• 3.9 billion 4-syllable words e.g. “MIHNEEHAHA”
• 976 billion 5-syllable words e.g. “YUHKOOLAYMOWNOH”
• 244 trillion 6-syllable words e.g. “XOOÞUHKEHTEEFOOPAH”

As with the universe, the numbers grow large pretty quickly, which might give you pause that names will become uncomfortably long. This needn’t be the case.

Current full-sky star catalogs top out in the neighborhood of 1 billion stars. More specific catalogs rarely total more than a few million. It’s not difficult to conclude that four syllables will be sufficient for the foreseeable future…though we have more available if we need them.

I suggest that the 250 1-syllable words be used as prefix codes that are optional in communication if the context is known. For example, “BAH” could mean galaxy, “DAI” would be star, “SOH” would be planet, “FOW” a moon, etc. In all, we’d probably only need to use a few dozen to broadly categorize the objects in the universe. If necessary, a second syllable could be used to further refine a definition—mostly for cataloging purposes: “SOH” for planet with “GAH” added to indicate a gas giant, or “ROH” added for a rocky planet, etc. Then you tag on a name that is only as long as necessary for the context—and which doesn’t duplicate a previous entry or inadvertently create an inappropriate word (hence the need for human editing).

Thus, instead of Kepler-20e, you might have DAI-KEHPUH/SOH-SEEYAH; and for Kepler-20f DAI-KEYPUH/SOH-BEEYAH. I used slashes to allow for and indicate appended parent entities. In practice, we’d probably refer to these worlds either as just “SEEYAH” and “BEEYAH”, or slightly more formally as “KEHPUH-SEEYAH” and “KEHPUH-BEEYAH”.

For database purposes, this sort of coding is very compact. With 25 consonants and 10 vowels, a syllable is easily encoded as a letter + digit pair. BAH might be B0, DAY as D1, etc. A five-syllable name could catalog a specific star in the Andromeda galaxy as something like C3P0R2D2D7 without (much) fear that it would be repeated.

Of course, we’d probably want to use symbols to make the human-readable name more compact as well. Some of the standard digraphs (e.g. “DH”) have already been substituted for with a single-character symbol in the consonant list. The vowels, too, will need added characters, perhaps borrowing from Greek or Cyrillic so as to avoid using diacritics. The list looking more like:

• A=”AH”
• E=”EE”
• I=”AI”
• O=”OH”
• U=”OO”
• ə=”UH”
• Э=”EH”
• Λ=”AY”
• Г=”IH”
• ∂=”OW”

(There will likely be resistance to non-Latin characters. This is just a suggestion, not a mandate. It’s probably more likely that people will opt for Latin digraphs so they won’t have to find the “special character” button on their editor. Fair enough.)

I don’t doubt that something like this has been suggested before as it’s a fairly obvious solution to a continuing problem. I’d like to think that combining a moderated (so bad and/or already used words are avoided), computer-generated, pseudo-random cataloging and naming system in this way will ease some of the pain that the various bodies go through in trying to find unique names that are relevant both to astronomers and the lay-public.