Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist, Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethest and the society's deputy director, Dr. Robert Massey.

This is the place where we dive into the supermassive mailbox and answer all of your questions.

It really is supermassive at the minute is as well, isn't it? Because you guys have the best

questions. It's accreting at an alarming rate. Exactly. It is. But we have been entrusted with a great

responsibility. This message comes from the Adventures of Buckley and they say,

Hi, I really enjoy your podcast. My partner and I recently found out we're having a baby and a researching baby names.

We wondered if you could help with your favorite astronomy, space-themed names. Thank you.

I mean, where do you start, really?

Congratulations.

I was thinking, you know, my colleague Lucinda has a cat called Kepler, and I'm more comfortable

offering people pet names than baby names by some margin, really.

Yeah, I mean, you could name, though, after star names is probably, I guess, but there must be

thousands of possibilities, right, that names that would sound like the first things that sprung

to mind were like very astronomy themed names. I'm not sure if they fit into that favorite category,

but they're like, Aracoth, Arcturus, you know, just like really lean into it.

Yeah, I was trying to think of ones that were maybe a little bit more like you could get away with it and if you, unless you knew, you know, like you wouldn't know. So I was thinking like moons of the solar system, right, is one of the greatest places to start. Especially for girls' names, right? True. Because Uranus's moons are just all Shakespeare characters, right? Yeah. Yeah. you got got Ariel, Belinda, Bianca, Cordelia, Cresceda, Juliet, right? Like, name a few at the start of the alphabet, right? But then also Phoebe is the moon of Saturn, if you wanted to go for a Phoebe. Oh, that's true. You know? And there's Miranda as well, a moon of Uranus. Mm-hmm. Yeah, exactly. And then also I found for boys, so Zeke is obviously like the shortened form of Ezekiel in like a Hebrew and that's quite a popular name. But in Arabic, Zeke Z-E-E-K-E means like shooting star. Oh. So it's quite a nice little connection as well. But then also you've got like every astronaut as inspiration, right? If it's a girl, it could be Valentina after Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, or if it's a boy,

it could be Yuri or Alan or Neil, right? They go under the radar. Love that. Not enough

Niels. Exactly. But I think you can find like an astronomy-spacy connection with like so many

names that people just don't

realize that like even ones that are more common like for example louise or paul

after louise webster and paul murden who discovered the first black hole signus x-1

oh there we go there's so many possibilities poor morden was my colleague at the r as

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