International Astronomical Union

In the span of two months, 1994 XF04 went from just another rock floating in space to an extinction event waiting to happen.

In December of 1994, researchers at Kimona University, working with the International Astronomical Union, mapped out Ulysses' course and found that it would pass within Earth's Roche limit in 1994.

A Roche limit, for context, is how close a celestial body, so like an asteroid, a planetoid, a moon, whatever, how close it can get to another one, a bigger one, before its own gravity gets overwhelmed and it gets ripped to pieces.

I think we talked about this in, uh, Wandering Earth.

To consider, for example, what would happen if the lewd 1982 song My Sharona were instead an ode to a processed meat product entitled My Bologna.

So it is fitting that this month the International Astronomical Union approved the naming of asteroid 14331 Alyankovik.

Alison McGraw, a planetary scientist who collaborated on the naming process, says, "...for countless scientists, engineers, programmers, educators and students, his work helped create an environment where being enthusiastic about learning was something worth celebrating." With typical modesty, Mr.

Yankovic himself has responded, This is perhaps the greatest honor I've ever received.

These are known to tell a story and reference many Greek myths and characters we all know from those stories.

40 more are added from the 16th to the 18th centuries and then adopted as official in 1928 by the International Astronomical Union called the IAU.

The original 48 tell stories which seem to be hidden away by modern names such as telescopium.

telescopium, which have no story other than to mark a scientific tool.

So there are 88 officially recognized constellations in Earth's night sky.

But who recognizes them? It's the International Astronomical Union.

And this is the global body that professional astronomers recognize as the cosmic naming authority and rulemaker for the heavens.

They decide what counts as a planet, sorry Pluto, what to call newly discovered stars, asteroids, and craters, and how humanity keeps a shared map of the universe.

So we've got contributors from all over the world now.

We are now a resource for the scientists at CASCA.

And we're now linked with the International Astronomical Union's working group on star names.

It's an ongoing project, and one of the issues you have to deal with is the sensitivity of those people who had their cultures taken away from them.

Mercury's geometry strips away the moderating influence of seasons.

leaving it trapped in an eternal presence of the same thermal extremes the naming of mercury's craters follows a unique convention among solar system bodies with the international astronomical union designating that craters be named for famous artists writers composers and other contributors to human culture rather than for scientists or explorers as on other worlds The Craters of Mercury are named for painters, novelists, poets, musicians, philosophers, and other cultural figures, a choice that reflects a desire to celebrate human creativity and artistic achievement on this distant world.

The largest impact basin, Caloris, was given its Latin name meaning heat, a reference to its position and the extremes of temperature it experiences.

Beyond Caloris, the craters spread across Mercury's surface, bearing names that sound foreign to ears accustomed to scientific nomenclature.

Smart

idea, right, Rod? And, you know, just to add to this conversation, the International Astronomical Union, they're the naming group for these.

You and I don't have a crater on the moon, and maybe many listeners don't at this point, but it was named McKetchin.

And it's named after Thomas McEtchen, an Apollo-era scientist who worked on impact ballistics.

Sphere?

No, it has to be approved by the International Astronomical Union.

Are those just names of your friends?

Maybe.