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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Goings On |
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Time and Space |
Sex and the Planets
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Published :1 September 2010 |
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| It’s awkward on an astronomical scale: 24 Sextanis is a sub-giant star located in the constellation Sextans, and is orbited by two recently identified planets called Sex b and Sex c. If that weren’t enough innuendo, one of the discoverers of Sex c is a Caltech professor named John Johnson. These ‘coincidences’ don’t happen often, which is a celestial blessing, since another involves the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE). The instrument was designed to read starlight and albedo, lent its name to an exoplanet, then called OGLE-TR-56b. A naming convention has been suggested to wipe away the grins and the consternation alike, but there are already 473 discovered planets and counting, and the usual Latin and Greco-Roman names could prove insufficient. Some have also suggested the names of film stars and entertainers and outstanding politicians, but the counter-argument is that they are already too full of their own importance.
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