Ask Ethan: What are the worst cosmic misnomers? | by Ethan Siegel | Begins With A Bang! | Feb, 2025
Traditionally, astronomers have typically named issues creatively, bizarrely, and infrequently inaccurately. However which phrases are essentially the most egregious?
On the market within the Universe, there are all types of fascinating objects, phenomena, and occasions which have been both predicted, theorized, or instantly noticed. A few of them are named fairly intuitively, as we now have no downside with names like star-forming area or stellar remnant. Others are named a little bit extra poetically, like kugelblitz, which refers to a (theoretical) black gap shaped from radiation alone, or syzygy, which is the alignment of three (or extra) astronomical our bodies. Nonetheless others are phrases that had been derived from acronyms, with objects like quasars derived from the acronym QSRS: quasi-stellar radio sources. Whereas astronomers are type of infamous for concocting pointless acronyms (astronomer Glen Petitpas has created a Dumb Or Overly Pressured Astronomical Acronym Web site, or DOOFAAS database), we are able to go additional, and look to astronomy names which might be full misnomers: named in such a manner that the literal that means of the phrases used to explain the item or phenomenon inaccurately symbolize what it really is.
That’s the inquiry of Patreon supporter Tim Graham, who was studying this current article on the T…
