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It may be sufficiently massive to be in hydrostatic equilibrium and therefore a dwarf planet. Gonggong's large mass makes retention of a tenuous atmosphere of methane just possible, though such an atmosphere would slowly escape into space. The object is named after Gònggōng, a Chinese water god responsible for chaos, floods and the tilt of ...
The brightest planets in the sky have been named from ancient times. The scientific names are taken from the names given by the Romans: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Our own planet is usually named in English as Earth, or the equivalent in the language being spoken (for instance, two astronomers speaking French would call it la ...
Indeed, the draft of Resolution 5A had called these median bodies planetoids, [32] [33] but the plenary session voted unanimously to change the name to dwarf planet. [2] The second resolution, 5B, defined dwarf planets as a subtype of planet, as Stern had originally intended, distinguished from the other eight that were to be called "classical ...
After measuring Quaoar's size with the Hubble Space Telescope in July, the team began considering names for the object, particularly those from local Native American mythologies. [29] Following the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) naming convention for minor planets, non-resonant Kuiper belt objects are to be named after creation ...
Crater chains are named after Sun gods. Fluctūs Names of fluctūs are derived from a nearby named feature, fire, sun, thunder or volcano gods, goddesses and heroes or mythical blacksmiths. Mensae, Montes, Plana, Regiones and Tholi These features can be named after places associated with Io mythology, derived from nearby named features, or ...
According to Plutarch and Stobaeus, the term planeta was in use by the time of Anaximander, in the early sixth century BC. [1] The relative positions of the planets, which in the reckoning of Democritus included the Sun and Moon, was the subject of debate, as was their number; in Timaeus, Plato counts only the five still regarded as astronomical planets, excluding the Sun and Moon.
Eris (minor-planet designation: 136199 Eris) is the most massive and second-largest known dwarf planet in the Solar System. [22] It is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) in the scattered disk and has a high-eccentricity orbit. Eris was discovered in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory–based team led by Mike Brown and verified later that year.
By RYAN GORMAN Scientists may have found Planet X -- the long-rumored object believed to be larger than Earth and further from the sun than Pluto. Planet X and another object dubbed "Planet Y ...