Naming of moons
The naming of moons has been the responsibility of the International Astronomical Union's committee for Planetary System Nomenclature since 1973.
Before the IAU assumed responsibility for astronomical nomenclature, only twenty-five satellites had been given names that were in wide use and are still used: 1 of Earth, 2 of Mars, 5 of Jupiter, 10 of Saturn, 5 of Uranus, and 2 of Neptune.
More recently, especially in science-fiction content, the Moon has been called by the Latin name Luna, presumably on the analogy of the Latin names of the planets, or by association with the adjectival form lunar, or a need to differentiate it from other moons that may be present in a fictional setting.
The Galilean moons of Jupiter (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) were named by Simon Marius soon after their discovery in 1610.
By the first decade of the 20th century, the names Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto had once again recovered popularity, but the later-discovered moons, numbered, usually in Roman numerals V (5) through XII (12), remained unnamed.
[3][dubious – discuss] By a popular though unofficial convention,[citation needed] Jupiter V, discovered in 1892, was given the name Amalthea,[4] first used by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion.
[5] The other irregular satellites (discovered 1904 to 1951) were, in the overwhelming majority of astronomical literature, simply left nameless.
At the IAU General Assembly in July 2004,[2] the WGPSN allowed Jovian satellites to be named for Zeus' descendants in addition to his lovers and favorites which were the previous source of names, due to the large number of new Jovian satellites that had then recently been discovered.
Current IAU practice for newly discovered inner moons is to continue with Herschel's system, naming them after Titans or their descendants.
At the IAU General Assembly in July 2004,[2] the WGPSN allowed satellites of Saturn to have names of giants and monsters in mythologies other than the Greco-Roman.
[17] In the 1840s, better instruments and a more favourable position of Uranus in the sky led to sporadic indications of satellites additional to Titania and Oberon.
[18] With the confirmation of Ariel and Umbriel, Lassell numbered the moons I through IV from Uranus outward, and this finally stuck.
Herschel, instead of assigning names from Greek mythology, named the moons after magical spirits in English literature: the fairies Oberon and Titania from William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the sylphs Ariel and Umbriel from Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock (Ariel is also a sprite in Shakespeare's The Tempest).
In 1949, the fifth moon, Miranda, was named by its discoverer, Gerard Kuiper, after a thoroughly mortal character in Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Although the name Triton was suggested in 1880 by Camille Flammarion, it did not come into general use until the mid 20th-century, and for many years was considered "unofficial".
Current IAU practice for newly discovered Neptunian moons is to accord with these first two choices by naming them after Greek sea deities.
The name of Haumea and its moons were suggested by David L. Rabinowitz of Caltech and refer to the mother goddess and her daughters in Hawaiian mythology.
[25] On 23 March 2009, Brown asked readers of his weekly column to suggest possible names for the satellite of Orcus which he had codiscovered, with the best one to be submitted to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) on 5 April.
[26] The name Vanth, the winged Etruscan psychopomp who guides the souls of the dead to the underworld, was chosen from among a large pool of submissions.
Among them are the following: The Roman numbering system for satellites arose with the very first discovery of natural satellites other than Earth's Moon: Galileo referred to the Galilean moons as I through IV (counting from Jupiter outward), refusing to adopt the names proposed by his rival Simon Marius.
Similar numbering schemes naturally arose with the discovery of multiple moons around Saturn, Uranus, and Mars.
In the middle of the 19th century, however, the numeration became fixed, and later discoveries failed to conform with the orbital sequence scheme.
The outer irregular satellites of Jupiter (VI through XII) were left officially unnamed throughout this period, although as stated above some unofficial names were used in some contexts.
After a few months or years, when a newly discovered satellite's existence has been confirmed and its orbit computed, a permanent name is chosen, which replaces the "S/" provisional designation.
The following names were adopted by informal processes preceding the assumption by the IAU of control over the assignment of satellite nomenclature in 1973.
