There’s a lot of news about the planets right now, what with all five naked-eye planets putting on a show in the morning sky, and astronomers saying they’ve discovered a new, ninth planet. So, what’s a planet to you and me anyway?
The word ‘planet’ comes from the Ancient Greeks and it means ‘wandering star.’ The Greeks recognized two kinds of stars: ‘fixed stars’, the ones that held their positions relative to one another as they followed their courses around the Earth; and ‘wandering stars’, our planets, the ones that followed a different course and appeared to change their positions.
So we have to think about this: The ancients didn’t discover the planets the way astronomers discover planets today, by using telescopes and finding things that haven’t seen before. For the ancients, the planets had been visible and known since the beginning of time, and because they appeared to wander or move about at their own will, they were known as the domain of the creator gods and goddesses.
We know these wandering stars as the classical planets and they have the names of their divine Roman counterparts: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. These five are visible to the naked eye and they’re all on display in the morning sky right now.
Then we get to the outer planets, Uranus, Neptune, and until recently Pluto. Now even though these guys also have the names of Roman gods, they were not known to the ancients, and they’re not visible to the naked eye. And, the astronomers who agreed to these names didn’t believe these objects were the domain of the Gods whose names they used….
And now we have this new era of planet, which is so far away from us that its orbit of the Sun will take between 10 and 20,000 years. This new planet has not been seen yet, but once it is, the game will be on for a name, so dust off your knowledge of Roman gods and goddesses and get ready!