In 1705, Edmond Halley realized that celestial sightings in 1531, 1607, and 1683 were of the same entity—a comet. Halley’s Comet (opposite page) streaks over Hawaii’s Mauna Kea observatories in 1986.

In the beginning-well, right after the beginning-was the cosmos: stars, galaxies, nebulae, novas, planets, minor planets (the fancy term for asteroids), comets, and satellites, more and more numerous and varied, as humans and telescopes and astronomy clubs evolved to observe them. Soon names were needed to keep all of the celestial objects straight-Mars, Jupiter, Betelgeuse, Shoemaker-Levy-and eventually an international body, the International Astronomical Union, was needed to record the names. By and by, this body divided itself into various sub-bodies, various committees, teams, and task groups, each one responsible for approving and rejecting names of cosmic elements according to their class and a widening body of rules: So many sub-bodies and rules came about that at last an individual was appointed to remember them all. His name is Brian G. Marsden. 

“I’m the associate director for planetary sciences at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of the Minor Planets Center,” Marsden said one afternoon in his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The Minor Planets Center is involved with orbits of minor planets and for naming minor planets. This is done through a committee called the Small Bodies Names Committee. We have 11 members. I receive the information and pass it on to the others for judging.” Marsden is also director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, the authority for naming comets. Commission Twenty, he informed me, runs the Minor Planets Center, but Commission Six runs the Central Bureau. A third arm of the International Astronomical Union, the Working Group on Planetary System Nomenclature, oversees the naming of features on satellites. “Just for completeness, the International Astronomical Union is involved in naming things outside the solar system; that’s done through Commission Five. Ah, yes, we need another group for naming the committees!”


Ida (left) is the only asteroid to boast a moon, which was discovered and named Dactyl in 1993. Ida comes from the nymph Ida, of Greek mythology, whose children, the Dactyli, were fathered by Zeus. Asteroid Ida’s craters share names with famous caves on Earth.

Features on Mercury’s surface(above)  were almost all named in the 1970s.

On the far side of Earth’s Moon is the 115-mile-wide Tsiolkovskiy crater (above), named for the late Russian engineer Konstantine Tsiolkovskiy. There are still a few craters on the Moon’s near side that are unnamed.

Marsden and his bevy of committees rarely name things themselves. That privilege belongs to the discoverer. An astronomer spots a new comet or asteroid, proposes a name, and sends it to Marsden, who navigates the channels of onomatology—the science of nomenclature bylaws and regulation—and returns with thumb up or thumb down. He is an appellative catalyst, if you will, the keeper of the gate. Anyone wishing to add a name to the cosmic script, to achieve immortality, or at least get a dozen zeros closer to it, must pass through him. And so it was that I found myself in his office one bright day recently. My own time on this Earth is short, so I was blunt with Marsden.

“Frankly,” I said, “I’d like to see about having something named for me.”

Astronomer Brian G. Marsden sits next to Harvard University’s 153-year-old telescope. “Naming is a small part of what we do here,” Marsden says. “Mainly we want to keep track of things.”

Marsden works on garden street, in Building A of the astrophysics center, a smallish brick structure designed in the architecturally anonymous style of the 1950s: concrete walls, fluorescent lights, granite-pink linoleum floors, steel doors that slam behind you when you venture from one corridor to the next. The inhabitants of this system scurry about and are mostly of a type: male, pallid, thin, young verging on ageless. What remains of their hair is as disheveled as their cramped offices. Marsden, fairly luminous by contrast, wears slacks and a starched oxford shirt. He combs his white hair neatly across his head. His manner is avuncular, his cheeks quick to flush. If he is not animating a point with his hands, he is chuckling and leaning back in his swivel chair, fingers entwined and resting on his rounding middle. When I stopped by, he was sitting behind a green steel desk awash in paper.

“I figure I spend 20 hours a week on names alone,” he said cheerily. “An inordinate amount of time is spent on something that has no scientific value whatsoever.”

Mars’s canyon system Valles Marineris (far left) stretches across the waist of the planet. It is a few hundred miles southeast of Tharsis, a volcanic plain (left).

In 1996, Japanese amateur astronomer Yuji Hyakutake discovered the brightest comet seen in the sky since 1976 (right). It is now called Comet Hyakutake.





 

As Marsden soon made clear, the rules that govern the naming of different celestial bodies render me outright ineligible for certain categories. Cross stars off your list, he said: They don’t even get names anymore. There are too many. Not long ago I was mailed an enticing brochure from a company in Illinois called the International Star Registry. For a modest fee, I could name a star for myself, my sweetheart, even my favorite sales agent. I would receive a parchment certificate with the name and coordinates of my star and a detailed chart with my star circled in red. Best of all, the brochure added, “Because these star names are copyrighted with their telescopic coordinates in the book Your Place in the Cosmos, future generations may identify the star name in the registry and, using a telescope, locate the actual star in the sky.”

“It’s a scam,” Marsden said. “Astronomers don’t recognize those names. The Library of Congress doesn’t recognize those names. They’re misleading the public. I’ve seen a few certificates giving the positions of the star—I’ve checked and there wasn’t a star there. Either they’re making up star positions, or they’re not interpreting the charts correctly.”