Kulturkampf

[Propagandhim]

A group of astronomers is coalescing around an idea to rename two neighbors of the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

Named after explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the satellite galaxies are visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. But Magellan’s name is not fitting, astronomer Mia de los Reyes and colleagues argue. The leader of the first expedition to successfully circle the globe, Magellan enslaved and killed Indigenous people encountered on the voyage, which set out from Spain in 1519 (SN: 9/17/19).

“Because we’re naming things in the night sky, which belongs to everyone, we think that it’s important to have names that reflect all of humanity,” says de los Reyes, of Amherst College in Massachusetts. She calls for the name change in an opinion piece published September 12 in Physics. Magellan’s voyage helped pave the way for Spanish colonialism in South America, Guam and the Philippines, says de los Reyes, who is Filipino American. “Many people see Magellan as a villain in the Philippines.”

The clouds were noted by a member of his expedition, but they were already well-known to many cultures in the Southern Hemisphere, and even to previous European explorers. “It doesn’t make sense to have them named after any one person, let alone a person who never actually studied them,” says astronomer Gurtina Besla of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Nothing new going on in the astronomy world these days, i guess