Comments on: Unifying Concepts and Language

By: Skeptic Tim

Skeptic Tim — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:23:19 +0000

I think, in part, this apparent confusion arises from forgetting the origin of acronyms. Way back in the early bronze age (the 1960’s) when I was a grad student in astrophysics, a (relatively) new phenomena had been discovered – stars, that looked like stars, but had really strange spectra. These weird things were called “Quasi Stellar Objects”, (shortened to QSO’s) meaning they were “sort of stars but weird”, (Proposals included the idea that they really were stars in our galaxy but were moving away really fast; to account for their redshift). The word “Qausar” was nothing more than a handy way of enunciating QSO or Quasi Stellar, We also knew about Seyfert galaxies (named after some guy called Carl Keenan Seyfert way back in the early 1940’s) but did not yet realize that they were related to QSO’s (so OK some astronomers were hypothesizing that maybe …). Perhaps, in the service of precision and understanding we should learn to be a bit more careful in our use of acronyms, and other shorthands when describing poorly understood phenomena.

By: Laurel Kornfeld

Laurel Kornfeld — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 02:35:04 +0000

To Vagueofgodalming: This is a very informative post, but it does not make clear that the IAU couldn’t avoid the 2006 Pluto decision. That decision made things more complicated, not less. First, it stated that a dwarf planet is not a planet at all–this makes no linguistic sense and is confusing, to say the least. Second, the requirement that an object “clear the neighborhood of its orbit” is so vague that if applied literally, it could disqualify all the planets in our solar system, none of which have fully cleared their orbits of nearby asteroids. The fact that an equal number of astronomers to those who voted immediately rejected the IAU decision speaks volumes about its serious flaws. Then we have the plutoid definition, which the IAU states applies to objects orbiting beyond Neptune. That means Pluto is excluded from the plutoid category when its orbit takes it closer to the sun than Neptune!

What we have here is a huge mess and all because the IAU couldn’t leave well enough alone and allowed a tiny minority of its membership to push through an unusable definition. It would have been better if they had done nothing and postponed action until we have the data from New Horizons and Dawn.

By: hale_bopp

hale_bopp — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:13:57 +0000

And don’t get me started on “planetary nebula”…nebula used to refer to a whole bunch of different types of objects! And we have waxing and waning Moons but I never hear anyone talk about waxing and waning phases of Venus and Mercury.

By: Wayne

Wayne — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:38:37 +0000

Biological names are not always well defined either, particularly in botany. Botanists are now changing the names of many plants and sometimes changing some of them back to their original names. They also seem to loke to change simple 5 letter names e.g. Aster to to hard to remember 14 letter names – Symphyotrichum. And there the splitters and the lumpers. The splitters want to give every little variation in a plant species a variety of form name and the lumpers want to lump those varieties to just the species name. So astronomy is not the only confusing field when it comes to names.

By: pamela

pamela — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:20:48 +0000

Clearly I was blogging while under the influence of not enough coffee.

About to spell check.

(And I think it is “A QSO is also an Active Galactic Nucleus” the same way I can say “A cougar is also a cat.” Both are singular.)

By: Freiddie

Freiddie — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:09:19 +0000

Thanks for clarifying: I didn’t even know all those Active Galatic Nuclei terms are even related to each other. Maybe the physics community should really start working on a naming system, like chemists do.

(typos: mamal?, Andremeda?)

By: Nicole

Nicole — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:22:07 +0000

Heh, you forgot blazar. How that’s different from a BL Lac I still don’t understand…

Is there a way that searches can include some kind of text-matching like that so that when you put in one term, such as active galaxy, you also get back radio galaxy and supermassive black hole? But then the question is, do you want all active galaxy references when you are just interested in radio galaxies or just in Sy 1s. Sheesh…

And why do we still say “early and late type” galaxies?!

By: ProgrammerGeek

ProgrammerGeek — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:49:28 +0000

FYI these naming conventions and multiple categorizations of objects make if very difficult for beginners to understand anything that is being talked about. We are always extremely overwhelmed.

By: Vagueofgodalming

Vagueofgodalming — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:37:51 +0000

Interesting. After the recent creation of the Plutoid designation I’d been wondering again about why the IAU felt it had to decide one way or the other back in 2006, and this post makes it clear it was something they couldn’t really avoid.

Thank you.

By: Wilson

Wilson — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:30:29 +0000

Hmm, shouldn’t that be “a QSO is also an Active Galactic Nucleus”, with “nuclei” being the plural?

(yes, yes, nit picking etc. etc.)