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The nine parts of the navagraha are the Sun, Moon, planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and the two nodes of the Moon. [2] A typical navagraha shrine found inside a Hindu temple. The term planet was applied originally only to the five planets known (i.e., visible to the naked eye) and excluded the Earth.
In the popular science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Ford Prefect was from "a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse." [ 219 ] Two American navy ships were named after the star, both of them World War II vessels, the USS Betelgeuse (AKA-11) launched in 1939 and USS Betelgeuse (AK-260 ...
Saturn is named after the Roman god of wealth and agriculture, who was the father of the god Jupiter.Its astronomical symbol has been traced back to the Greek Oxyrhynchus Papyri, where it can be seen to be a Greek kappa-rho ligature with a horizontal stroke, as an abbreviation for Κρονος (), the Greek name for the planet (). [35]
Size (left) and distance (right) of a few well-known galaxies put to scale. The following is a list of notable galaxies.. There are about 51 galaxies in the Local Group (see list of nearest galaxies for a complete list), on the order of 100,000 in the Local Supercluster, and an estimated 100 billion in all of the observable universe.
French astronomers began calling it Herschel before German Johann Bode proposed the name Uranus, after the Greek god. The name "Uranus" did not come into common usage until around 1850. Starting in 1801, asteroids were discovered between Mars and Jupiter. The first few (Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta) were initially considered planets. As more and ...
Mars, the fourth planet from the Sun, is named after the Roman god of war because of its blood red color. Mars has two small, oddly-shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos, named after the sons of the Greek god Ares. At some point in the future Phobos will be broken up by gravitational forces. The atmosphere on Mars is 95% carbon dioxide.
In both the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, Jupiter was named after the chief god of the divine pantheon: Zeus to the Greeks and Jupiter to the Romans. [19] The International Astronomical Union formally adopted the name Jupiter for the planet in 1976 and has since named its newly discovered satellites for the god's lovers, favourites, and descendants. [20]
The cuneiform name used to designate Mercury on the MUL.APIN tablets is transcribed as UDU.IDIM.GU\U 4.UD ("the jumping planet"). [c] [152] Babylonian records of Mercury date back to the 1st millennium BC. The Babylonians called the planet Nabu after the messenger to the gods in their mythology. [153]