I recently wrote about renaming problematic things, like JWST. This topic has a lot of examples, from the observatory to schools named after Confederate traitors, bird species and more.

I also mentioned a couple of astronomical objects, but those were nicknames. More broadly, there’s a tendency for people — and by that I mean colonists — to rename geographic and other features that already have indigenous names. There’s been a push recently to rename things like mountains (Denali is now the name of the mountain that used to be Mt. McKinley, for example), and I’m all for it.

In all this I forgot to mention, though, that there’s some interest in renaming the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. These are two small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way, and are so close to us (under 200,000 light-years) that they are easily visible to the naked eye form the southern hemisphere. If you’ve ever seen the Andromeda Galaxy you know it’s a small fuzzy patch that you need a dark site to spot by eye, but the Clouds are huge, and easily visible even from mildly light polluted sites. I saw them on my first trip to Australia back in 2003 and it was overwhelming. I was so moved emotionally I choked up.

The Clouds are named after the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who is credited as leading the first expedition to circumnavigate the planet [Edited to add: Magellan himself didn’t make it all the way around; he was killed in 1521 before the voyage completed]. But his crew weren’t the first to see them; they weren’t even the first Westerners to see them! Indigenous peoples in the southern hemisphere had of course observed them for millennia, incorporating them into their myths and their navigational techniques.

Also, Magellan was, um, not a great person. He enslaved people he ran across, and murdered them as well — this is a common story for Western explorers, sadly (my friend Matt Inman of The Oatmeal has a great piece on Christopher Columbus, for example).

Astronomer Mia de los Reyes has written an excellent article on why we should rename the Clouds, not just because Magellan was a monster, but also to honor the names they were already given by people who knew these astronomical objects better. She also gives some examples:

I’m not just OK with this, I actively endorse it. We in the west, especially England and America, tend to think of the planet as ours, and that white people are the default against which others are compared. But the sky blankets us all, across the entire planet. The least we can do is honor those who came before us and use their names for these magnificent celestial bodies we now study so joyously. 

I don’t know of any official push for this by astronomers, but if one turns up I’ll be sure to let y’all know. It would be nice for the International Astronomical Union, the official keeper of astronomical names, to take this under consideration.

• An extremely distant galaxy spotted in a JWST image appears to sport a supermassive black hole despite us seeing the galaxy as it was when it was less than 500 million years old [link to journal paper]. The galaxy is called GHZ9 and has a redshift of about 10.4, meaning the light took 13.3 billion years to reach us. X-ray observations using the Chandra Observatory show it is blasting out high-energy light, and using that the astronomers calculate the black hole has a mass of 80 million times the mass of the Sun, and is so luminous it’s 10 trillion times brighter than the Sun! We still don’t know how black holes get so massive so rapidly; they either start as a “seed” black hole, forming when a 100-or-so solar mass black hole forms when a massive star explodes and then grows, or if it forms directly as material falls to the center of the galaxy. The latter makes a big black hole much more quickly, and this new observations seems to support that formation version. It’s not confirmed yet, so it’ll be nice to see more observations and work done on this intriguing object.

• Mars suffers something like 280 – 360 asteroid impacts big enough to make a crater 8 or more meters in diameter every year, according to a new study. The scientists based this estimate on Martian seismic activity recorded by NASA’s now defunct InSight lander, a mission designed to learn more about the interior of the planet [link to journal paper]. Understanding this number is important, because cratering can be used to determine the relative ages of regions, and if the rate is known then that can be turned into an absolute age. This number also alleviates some tension; orbital imaging has showed new craters forming at a rate lower than expected, but this new method agrees better with theory.

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