In 1781, astronomer William Herschel discovered a new planet. He wanted to name it Georgian Sidus (George’s Star) after King George III, but all of the other planets in the solar system were named ...

Melissa Breyer was Treehugger’s senior editorial director before moving to Martha Stewart. Her writing and photography have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, ...

Where did the names of the planets come from, and who gets to christen new ones? Any chance I might one day get to choose the name for something in space? Here's what science has to say: For as long ...

The five naked-eye planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn — have been known since antiquity. The Greeks called them Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares, Zeus, and Cronus, respectively. Aphrodite ...

If you step back in time, thousands of years ago, people knew about the brightest planets pretty much everywhere. These are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And pretty much every culture knew ...

Shortly after the announcement of the TRAPPIST-1 system, NASA crowdsourced its Twitter followers for possible planet names. The actual process of naming new planets, however, is a bit more involved.

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