Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [96]
In a fashion, women have traditionally been commemorated in the asteroid belt (see Chapter 15), that collection of rocky and metallic boulders which circle the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. With the exception of a category of asteroids named after heroes of the Trojan War, it used to be that all asteroids were named after women. First it was largely women of classical mythology, such as Ceres, Urania, Circe and Pandora. As available goddesses dwindled, the scope broadened to include Sappho, Dike, Virginia and Sylvia. Then, as the floodgates of discovery opened and the names of astronomers’ wives, mothers, sisters, mistresses and great-aunts were exhausted, they took to naming asteroids after real or hoped-for patrons and others, with a female ending appended, as, for example, Rockefelleria. By now more than two thousand asteroids have been discovered, and the situation has become moderately desperate. But non-Western traditions have hardly been tapped, and there are a multitude of Basque, Amharic, Ainu, Dobu and !Kung feminine names for future asteroids. In anticipation of an Egyptian-Israeli détente, Eleanor Helin of the California Institute of Technology proposed calling an asteroid she discovered Ra-Shalom. An additional problem—or opportunity, depending on how one views it—is that we may soon obtain close-up photographs of asteroids, with surface details that will cry out to be named.
Beyond the asteroid belt, on the planets and large moons of the outer solar system, no nondescriptive names have so far been bestowed. Jupiter, for example, has a Great Red Spot and a North Equatorial Belt, but no feature called, say, Smedley. The reason is that when we see Jupiter we are looking at its clouds, and it would not be a very fitting or at least not a very long-lived memorial to Smedley to name a cloud after him. Instead, the present major question on nomenclature in the outer solar system is what to name the moons of Jupiter. The moons of Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have satisfying or at least obscure classical names (see Table 2). But the situation for the fourteen moons of Jupiter is different.
TABLE 2
NAMES OF THE SATELLITES
OF THE OUTER PLANETS
Saturn Neptune
Janus Triton
Mimas Nereid
Enceladus
Tethys Uranus
Dione Miranda
Rhea Ariel
Titan Umbriel
Hyperion Titania
Iapetus Oberon
Phoebe
Pluto
Charon
The four large moons of Jupiter were discovered by Galileo, whose theological contemporaries were convinced by a vague amalgam of Aristotelian and Biblical ideas that the other planets could have no moons. The contrary discovery by Galileo was disconcerting to fundamentalist churchmen of the time. Possibly in an effort to circumvent criticism, Galileo called the moons the Medicean satellites—after his funding agency. But posterity has been wiser: they are known instead as the Galilean satellites. In a similar vein, when William Herschel of England discovered the seventh planet he proposed calling it George. If wiser heads had not prevailed, we might today have a major planet named after George III. Instead we call it Uranus.
The Galilean satellites were assigned their Greek mythological names by Simon Marius (commemorated on the Moon by a crater 27 miles across), a contemporary of Galileo and a disputant with him for the priority of their discovery. Marius and Johannes Kepler felt that it would be extremely unwise to name celestial objects after real people and particularly after political personages. Marius wrote: “I want the thing done without superstition and with the sanction of theologians. Jupiter especially is charged by the poets with illicit loves. Especially well-known among these are three virgins, whose love Jupiter secretly coveted and obtained, namely: Io … Callisto … and Europa … Yet even more ardently did he love the beautiful boy Ganymede … and so I believe that I have not done badly in naming the first Io, the second Europa, the third,