How did the solar system and all the planets get their names?
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It is estimated that over 4 million people have been abducted by alien life forms. But only one of them asked for it. This is Elio of Earth. If any aliens are listening, come and get me. From Disney and Pixar. Yes, I'm getting-- He'll go where no one has gone before. Welcome to the communityverse. What is this place? These are the lava tunnels. Gordon, I am not--

From the brains behind Brains On, this is the Moment of Um. Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Pluto, the most popular planet in the solar system. Uh-oh.

Okay, I'm not big enough to be a full-fledged planet. I'm actually smaller than the Earth's moon. But even though some people will say, oh, here comes Pluto, that little baby dwarf planet, I don't let it get me down. I'm always putting myself out there to expand my professional orbit. Today, I'm at the Intergalactic Convening of Extraterrestrial Emissaries. I see for short. Oh, time to grab a name tag.

Excuse me, may I sit next to you two? Wow, the finest and so far. You're superstars. And what beautiful names. Where'd you get them?

We get that all the time, don't we, Delphi? We do, we do. In fact, an Earthling named Luca recently sent in this recording all the way from the other side of the solar system. Hi, my name is Luca, and my question is, how did the solar system and all the planets get their name? My name is Dr. Maggie Adarin-Pocock, and I'm a space scientist and a science communicator.

It's quite interesting because this goes back quite a way because there are planets that we can see with the naked eye. So I'm talking about sort of Mercury is quite hard to see because its orbit is very close to the sun. You see it either in sort of a twilight or sort of early sunrise and it's very close to the sun, so it's hard to spot. And then you've got Venus, which is a twinkle, twinkle little star, you know, that

poem, it sort of sums up Venus because it's like a diamond in the sky. So very beautiful. Then we've got Earth, which we know about, Mars, then Jupiter and Saturn. All of these can be seen with the naked eye. And it's quite interesting because people sort of looked at the constellations and sort of came up with names of constellations and sort of stories behind them in a similar way. They had these things that they called wandering stars, which didn't quite tie in with the rest. They took their own path.

and people came up with names of them, like Mercury. And I think these names mainly stem from the Greco-Roman sort of eras, where they sort of saw these and they named them after Mars, the god of war, because it has a slightly fiery red colour. And Mercury was a messenger of the gods. And so they saw these sort of slightly, what they called these wandering stars, and gave them these names associated with the myths and legends that they had here on Earth. Um, uh,

So you see, Delphinus was named after a Greek astronomer almost 2,000 years ago. Delphinus means dolphin in Latin. See how my stars are positioned so it looks like I'm jumping out of the sea like a dolphin?

In Greek mythology, the sea god Poseidon sent a dolphin to fetch Amphitide, a sea goddess. That's the story Delfinus is named for. Safar's name is much newer, though. Safar is an exoplanet, which means it lives way outside of our solar system and can't be seen without a telescope. That's right. It was a long trip to Icy.

I wasn't discovered until 1996, when two American astronomers spotted little old me with their telescope. Then I had to wait another 20 years to get a name.

In 2015, the International Astronomical Union launched a contest which gave new names to 14 stars and 31 exoplanets. Just like me. I was named after an 11th century Spanish Arab astronomer, Ibn al-Saffar. Isn't that just out of this world? Oh, yeah. I'm so glad I came here.

If you liked this episode, take a second to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to flex your space knowledge even more, check out the Brains On podcast, where we just released a brand new space trivia episode. If you have a moment of up question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then.

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