• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 241 0

name. There are rules, decided upon by the International Astronomical Union, for the naming of most everything in the sky. Craters on Mercury have to be named for deceased poets; moon of Uranus are named for Shakespearean characters. For this type of object in the Kuiper belt, the rules said that the name had to be a creation deity in a mythology. After some quick thought, Chad and I decided that we should move from Old World mythologies, which have been traditionally used, to New World mythologies, in honor of where Object X was found. We even thought we might try to preserve the X. If you’re looking for New World mythologies and names that begin with X, you can do no better than the Aztecs. They were fond of X names—Xiuhtecuhtli is one of my favorites—but none of those felt quite right, or quite pronounceable. A little more Internet searching brought us to consider more local deities. Object X had been found at Mount Palomar, which is surrounded by Native American tribal reservations. Did the Pala tribe have deities? The Pechanga tribe? What gods did they worship in earlier days? We searched the Internet but couldn’t find any; our search brought up only early-eighties entertainers who were currently playing at their massive Harrah’s casinos, whose Las Vegas–style lighting is slowly ruining the view of the sky above the telescopes on top of Palomar. But we did find something even more local: The Tongva tribe, mostly known as the Gabrielino Indians because of their proximity to and assimilation into the San Gabriel Mission, had long been the inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin. In their mythology, the world was begun when their creation force—called Kwawar—sang and danced the universe into existence. It occurred to us, though, that there were actual members of the Tongva tribe around and that we really should ask their permission first.

We didn’t know anyone in the Tongva tribe, but Chad went to www.tongva.com, found a phone number, and called it. The chief answered. Chad said something like, “Hi, I’m an astronomer from Caltech, and we just discovered something big in this region of space called the Kuiper belt and were hoping to name it after a Tongva creation myth and wanted to talk to you about it,” at which point the chief probably thought there was a pretty good chance that Chad was a lunatic rather than an astronomer from Caltech. Perhaps to hedge his bets, or perhaps just to get rid of Chad as quickly as possible, he gave the name of the tribal historian and chief dancer, who would be a better person to talk to about such matters.

Chad made the next phone call. After Chad convinced the tribal historian that he was not a crazy person but was indeed an astronomer who had found something half the size of Pluto that needed a name, the Tongva agreed that Kwawar—or rather Quaoar, their preferred spelling—was the appropriate name.

The correct pronunciation of Quaoar sounds like Kwa-o-ar, with a very soft W sound and a bit of a Spanish roll to the R, no doubt a product of the mission days. Simply saying Kwawar works fine, too. But when we picked the name, it didn’t occur to us that if you didn’t see it spelled Kwawar originally, as Chad and I had, the English language doesn’t give many clues on how to pronounce the word correctly. No word in the entire English language has that particular combination of four vowels: aoaa. People trying to pronounce it tend to start with the Q and then quickly trail off into nothingness.

With a name in place, we were now ready to announce to the other scientists and to the world what we had found. A large international meeting of astronomers was taking place in Birmingham, Alabama, just two hours from my hometown, and we decided to make the announcement there. Chad submitted a paper with the innocuous-sounding title “Large Kuiper Belt Objects.” In his talk, he discussed everything that we had learned: Quaoar’s oddly circular yet inclined orbit, its diameter about half the size of Pluto’s, its icy surface. All of the questions, though, had nothing to do with Quaoar. Most of the inquiries