Rock Legends ─ The Asteroids and Their Discoverers

This book relates the history of asteroid discoveries and christenings, from those of the early pioneering giants of Hersehel and Piazzi to modern-day amateurs. Moving from history and anecdotal information to science, the book's structure is provided by the names of the asteroids, including one named after the author. 

Names of celestial objects are a subjective human invention which serves only to help scientists remember what they are talking about. Thus the names of asteroids have a human significance for the discoverer, for other astronomers and for the wider community.

Free from a need to conform to scientific naming conventions, the names evidence hero-worship, sycophancy, avarice, vanity, whimsy, erudition and wit, revealing the human side of astronomers, especially where controversy has followed the christening, as has happened many times. Murdin draws from extensive historical records to explore the debate over these names, as when the choice of “Maximiliana” was overridden as being overly clunky, only to be reinstalled sixty years later on a new discovery. Each age reveals its own biases and preferences in the naming process.

Originally regarded as “vermin of the skies”, asteroids are minor planets, rocky scraps left over from the formation of the larger planets, or broken fragments of worlds that have collided. Their scientific classification as “minor” planets makes them seen unimportant, but over the past decades asteroids have been acknowledged as key players in the Solar System. This view of their starring role even alters the trajectories of spacecraft: NASA’s policy for space missions en route to the outer planets is that they must divert to study passing asteroids whenever possible. Following the history of asteroid names reveals the evolving trajectory of their place in the study of the Solar System. Written for a general audience, it provides a complete tour of the fascinating world of asteroids.

 

Educated at the universities of Oxford and Rochester, NY, Paul Murdin has worked as an astronomer in the USA, Australia, England, Scotland and in Spain, where he led the operation of the Anglo-Dutch Isaac Newton Group of telescopes in the Canary Islands. He has been a research scientist (studying supernovae, neutron stars and black holes – in 1972 Paul discovered the nature of the first black hole known in our Galaxy, Cygnus X-1) and a science administrator for the UK Government and the Royal Astronomical Society. He works at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, England, and is Visiting Professor at John Moores University, Liverpool. He has a secondary career as a broadcaster and commentator for the BBC and CNN, as well as a lecturer and writer on astronomy, including repeat appearances on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and at a number of literary and science festivals, like those at Hay-on-Wye and Edinburgh, and on the QE2. His most recent books include Are We Being Watched? The Search for Life in the Cosmos (Thames and Hudson, 2013), and Planetary Vistas (Springer, 2015).