NameExoWorlds public voting is now underway

[Streetwind]

Rotations per minute. It's spinning really, really, really fast. What takes Earth 24 hours, that particular pulsar does every 6-odd milliseconds.

The wikipedia entry on Pulsars is an interesting read.

[AngelLestat]

You know, if you care that little, "why for" do you even come here to post? You add less than nothing to this thread.

Not to mention that you're not even informed as to which star systems and planets are being named, because some of them are as close as 10 light years.

You have 4 planets < 20 light years radius.

We put a name to stars only when they are important for some reason. The same will happen with planets, you said I am not adding nothing, but in fact I am adding common sense.

Each star may have an average of 4 planets (being pessimistic).

This is a trend that would not last, soon they will find planets faster that they can name it, and even for the planets that will renamed, its code name will be more popular.

[amelkin]

Please find here all infos concerning proposal of Astro-Club "Nippy": http://samlib.ru/a/amelxkin_a_a/vote.shtml

The culture of TILAPIA goes back to Ancient Egypt. TILAPIA is said (as a fish-goddess) to accompany and protect the sun god Ra on his daily journey across the sky. In ancient Egyptian art the fish-goddes Tilapia was depicted either as a fish (tilapia), or a woman with a fish emblem or crown on her head. She was a goddess of life and protection. Tilapia was represented by the hieroglyph K1 of the Gardiner List. The fish-goddess Tilapia is associated with the region Annu: constellations of Pisces, Cetus and Eridanus. Tilapia was considered as a daughter of the Sun, and this is very interesting, while the sun-like star "epsilon Eridani" is smaller and younger than our sun. http://samlib.ru/a/amelxkin_a_a/vote.shtml

Edited September 13, 2015 by amelkin

[Streetwind]

My word. It must have taken a special kind of mind-expanding substance to produce that website and its content.

[amelkin]

The culture of TILAPIA goes back to Ancient Egypt. TILAPIA is said (as a fish-goddess) to accompany and protect the sun god Ra on his daily journey across the sky. In ancient Egyptian art the fish-goddes Tilapia was depicted either as a fish (tilapia), or a woman with a fish emblem or crown on her head. She was a goddess of life and protection. Tilapia was represented by the hieroglyph K1 of the Gardiner List. The fish-goddess Tilapia is associated with the region Annu: constellations of Pisces, Cetus and Eridanus. Tilapia was considered as a daughter of the Sun, and this is very interesting, while the sun-like star "epsilon Eridani" is smaller and younger than our sun.

[Ten Key]

Epsilon Eridani features very prominently in science fiction stories and settings. It can also be found in almost any text or work on the search for life outside the solar system. I'm afraid you'll need to pry that name from my cold, dead hands.

[Streetwind]

Epsilon Eridani features very prominently in science fiction stories and settings. It can also be found in almost any text or work on the search for life outside the solar system. I'm afraid you'll need to pry that name from my cold, dead hands.

Keep in mind that the systematic name will not disappear, regardless of which common name is chosen.

That said, I did vote for the same

[Hcube]

Just looked through the list and...

Japanese names... Japanese names everywhere

[Streetwind]

Yeah. They're pretty much the only country which took the IAU's invitation for name submissions seriously, it seems. I think I read in an article somewhere that more Japanese organizations submitted suggestions than all other nations combined.

[Streetwind]

Alright, time to dig this thread back up!

The votes have been cast and counted, and the IAU has officially awarded new common names to 14 stars and 31 exoplanets (who will retain their systematic designations, of course). One star and one planet was not named, due to the winning result grossly violating the IAU naming guidelines. In several other cases, the actual awarded names were slightly different from the winning entries; for example, in multiple cases the winning entries were names already attributed to important asteroids and other minor bodies. In those cases, the IAU slightly changed the word or assigned a different one from the same lore/background (presumably in cooperation with the winning party).

It should please everyone involved that no "BS" names or joke entries managed to make their way past the IAU's vetting and onto the star charts.

The IAU also published detailed statistics of the voting. Around 70% of all unique voters cast only one vote, even though there were 20 votable entries. Only 3% of all voters actually considered all 20. This implies that the vast majority of the voters were in all likelyhood random people with no involvement in astronomy, who were recruited by friends and family (or social media) to cast one specific vote at the behest of someone else.

This trend is further supported if you look at the vote origins. over one third of all votes cast came from India alone. Amusingly, though Japan submitted by far the most naming suggestions, they don't even show up in the top ten of voter origin countries. They must be somewhere below 1%, less than Syria - which is in the middle of a war.

So what's with all the votes from India? Among the hundreds of finalists, there were only three entries submitted from India... and two of them received less than a thousand votes each. Perhaps the Indians were just really excited about astronomy then, and spread their votes? Nnnnnnnnope. The one remaining Indian naming suggestion received almost 219,000 votes. Even when considering the winners of all the categories, the second highest scoring one only has just over 38,000 votes - and that's still an outlier. The average category winner has just somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 votes. This implies that the four category winners which won with at least five-digit numbers of votes did so by mobilizing large numbers of otherwise uninterested people for their cause.

But seriously, almost 219,000 Indian votes for one single option. What could possibly motivate these people to be so utterly gung-ho about this? Well, unfortunately the same thing that disqualified the winning Indian entry and made tau Boötis and its planet the only category in this competition with no winner: the naming scheme was politically motivated. Guess somebody didn't read the IAU guidelines carefully enough!

 

(Source)