# Tag Info

15

It probably is a dwarf planet. (It almost certainly is a dwarf planet.) The naming procedures at the IAU are that "Objects that have an absolute magnitude (H) less than +1 [...] are overseen by two naming committees, one for minor planets and one for planets. [...] All other bodies are named by the minor-planet naming committee alone." source—wikipedia ...

6

This has to do with how minor planets obtain provisional names (see also Wikipedia). The year is divided into 24 half months, with a particular letter associated with each one. Each of these half-months has a number of cycles of length 25 depending on how many minor planets are discovered; a minor planet is assigned a letter corresponding to its order in the ...

4

One of the talking points of people how think that the definition of a planet should include Pluto is that during the 2006 vote on the definition of a planet, only a small percentage of the members of the IAU actually voted. This argument is very disingenuous or rather naive, or both. One the most disingenuous of all is Dr. Alan Stern, the principal ...

4

No, only the Hubble law was recommended to have its name changed (I'm a member of the IAU, so hopefully I'd have known if there were more votings). However, several astronomers (including myself) found the voting a bit… weird; while acknowledging the work of George Lemaître is admirable, many more people than him and Edwin Hubble contributed to the ...

4

You use this from https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/FeatureNameRequest. You need to follow the rules as set out in https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Page/Rules as well as following the themes for naming Moon based features https://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Page/Categories.

3

All star names are unofficial. A few stars have ancient names (such as Sirius) all other stars are referred to by their position in a catalogue or star atlas. As well as I can tell, Al Sadira means "the ostrich", or perhaps in context "The (riverbank) ostrich" indicating a type of tree that grows by rivers (baby name sites offer "lotus tree"). There may be ...

3

"What" is straightforward: L4 and L5 are two points on an orbit that are 60 degrees ahead and 60 degrees behind the planet, and so move as the planet orbits. If the planet is less than about 1/25 of the mass of the central object, then a combination of centrifugal and Coriolis forces will cause the L4 and L5 points to be places where a third body ...

2

To directly answer your question, the other answer is correct: The United States Geologic Survey's Astrobiology office handles ad hoc US submissions to the International Astronomical Union's nomenclature committee, so their form is what you would need to fill out. Nomenclature across the solar system has been set by the IAU to follow themes based on ...

2

In the linked article by A. Bouchard and another by J. Daley, the words "in the journal Lunar and Planetary Science" link not to a journal article but to a poster in a K-12 education session at the 2017 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. First author Kirby Runyon told Universe Today in 2017 that he would not submit this geophysical definition ...

2

Nomenclature on planetary bodies is meant to ease and standardize communication. If an object is referred to often, or if it is important for someone's research, then the scientist(s) involved can submit a name request to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), or through some other body that submits names to the IAU (such as the United States Geologic ...

1

I asked the at the minor planet center how the codes were decided, and the answer was Historically, the observatory codes were assigned ascending by longitude toward east (from prime meridian): 360 degrees were divided by numbers. When three digit numerical codes were not sufficient, letters plus two numbers were used again in bands toward the east. Some ...

1

The values $$\alpha_0 = 0.00 - 0.641 T$$ $$\delta_0 = 90.00 - 0.557 T$$ provide a first-order estimate of the movement of the right ascension ($\alpha_0$) and declination ($\delta_0$) of the direction of the Earth's north pole for short periods of time after the epoch, expressed to three digits of precision only. $T$ represents the time after epoch ...

1

As an example consider the prime meridian for Vesta. Based on Hubble images, the IAU had established a prime meridian based on the observation of the Obler's regio (a dark region). The prime meridian was defined as passes through the middle of this region. When the Dawn mission arrived at Vesta, it was discovered that the asteroid's pole was not in the ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible