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At the IAU General Assembly in July 2004, [2] the WGPSN suggested it may become advisable to not name small satellites, as CCD technology makes it possible to discover satellites as small as 1 km in diameter. Until 2014, names were applied to all planetary moons discovered, regardless of size. From 2015, some small moons have not received names.
Following this pattern, several hypothetical bodies were given names: Vulcan for a planet within the orbit of Mercury; Phaeton for a planet between Mars and Jupiter that was believed to be the precursor of the asteroids; Themis for a moon of Saturn; and Persephone, and several other names, for a trans-Plutonian planet.
The IAU's names for exoplanets – and on most occasions their host stars – are chosen by the Executive Committee Working Group (ECWG) on Public Naming of Planets and Planetary Satellites, a group working parallel with the Working Group on Star Names (WGSN). [1] Proper names of stars chosen by the ECWG are explicitly recognised by the WGSN. [1]
Two of the new moons orbit in the same direction as the planet rotates, which requires a name that ends in -a; the other three travel in the opposite direction and will be given names that end in ...
[1] Since the invention of the telescope, astronomers have given names to the surface features they have discerned, especially on the Moon and Mars. To found an authority on planetary nomenclature, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) was organized in 1919 to designate and standardize names for features on Solar System bodies.
Of the Solar System's eight planets and its nine most likely dwarf planets, six planets and seven dwarf planets are known to be orbited by at least 300 natural satellites, or moons. At least 19 of them are large enough to be gravitationally rounded; of these, all are covered by a crust of ice except for Earth's Moon and Jupiter's Io. [1]
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In the table below, unless indicated by a "†", the "modern proper name" is the name approved by the WGSN and entered in the List of IAU-approved Star Names [1] or otherwise approved by the IAU. The WGSN decided to attribute proper names to individual stars rather than entire multiple-star systems . [ 9 ]