Tag Archives: uranus

Let’s rename that Seventh Planet

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It has never (yet!) been a serious possibility, but the proposal to rename Uranus does keep popping up. And not simply because it sounds perverse in English no matter how you stress it, but because it violates the theme of the planets in our star system having names of gods in Latin.

“Uranus” was simply a Latin transliteration of a Greek god’s name. Moreover, the Greek Ouranos was god of the entire sky, so it’s a little weird to give a single planet this name.

Unfortunately, since Uranus was named (after a political fracas caused when William Herschel tried to name the planet he discovered after himself and then after the king of England) the other big Roman deities have mostly been scooped up. Ceres and Pluto are dwarf planets, for example. Vesta is an asteroid and Janus a satellite of Saturn.

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