What’s in a Name?

In a famous Shakespearean soliloquy, Juliet opines that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. While this certainly holds true, it does not change the fact that naming things is in our nature—it’s what we do. We as a species have been ascribing names to things since the dawn of language.

Contrary to what some might think, I do believe that defining what exactly a planet is has inherent value beyond semantics—though I will concede that the seemingly arbitrary definition chosen by the International Astronomical Union in 2006 left things a bit too ambiguous. To the ancient Greeks, basically anything up in the sky was a planet—including the Sun.

Thanks for democracy. We’ll take it from here.

Obviously, it isn’t silly that we came to define the Sun as a star; after all, we were the ones who defined what stars were in the first place—luminous spheroids of plasma held together by their self-gravity—and as we learned more about the cosmos, we learned that there are other types of stars out there apart from our own, such as supergiants, dwarves, neutron stars, and Wolf-Rayet stars. Names are by definition human constructs. Adam is tasked with giving names to things in the second chapter of the Bible! We hold the power of definition in our language, and with that definition, the power to adjust accordingly as new information becomes knowledge. 

Science does its best to describe our world; and while the names we give to things do not change the intrinsic nature of those things, the world that exists is not solely independent of our thoughts and perceptions. French sociologist Bruno Latour suggests that “nature is the ‘product’ of scientific controversy”.¹ We have the power to define what a planet really is; but I think we can do better than the IAU has done thusly—specifically since Pluto and Neptune actually share part of their orbital path. Why, then, is Neptune still a planet when its celestial neighborhood is not technically cleared? We are squabbling over technicalities, after all. Personally, I favor the term “ice planet” for both Pluto and Eris, though “dwarf planet” is a perfectly reasonable designation for now—and I believe that the debate is far from conclusively settled.

One thing is certain: any time space and astronomy is making breaking news, it is a good thing for the field. As with the more recent viral image of M87’s central black hole, it piques public interest, sparking peoples’ curiosity and excitement. 

Let’s all keep looking up.