Michelle Thaller
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
I gave a talk about those just a few weeks ago, the red dots, yes.
They never let astronomers name anything, right?
You're seeing something so dramatic, and they call it the little red dots, right?
Or there's a storm on Jupiter that's three times the size of the Earth with 400-mile-an-hour winds, and they call it the red spot, right?
Well, naming conventions, they're complex.
So if you discover a comet, if you discover an asteroid, you get to name it.
If you discover a comet, the comet is named after you.
But anything else has to be done by international committee.
And so because of that, things don't end up with very interesting names.
They all end up with catalog numbers, basically phone numbers.
I think they call that the hexagon on Saturn.
They don't even, they don't really, the hexagonal storm.
You could fit about two Earths across that.
And it's a hexagon jet stream, basically.