New rules have been approved by the IAU Executive Committee, following the recommendations of IAU Executive Committee Task Group on “Public Naming of Planets and Planetary Satellites”.

The document "Public Naming of Planets and Planetary Satellites: Reaching Out for Worldwide Recognition with the Help of the IAU" is now available online for download in PDF format (128 KB). Read about IAU's statements and rules regarding suggestions for names and public naming campaigns. 

Preamble

                        People have been naming celestial objects for at least as long as there has been written word. Almost every civilization and culture uses names to describe the stars and planets visible to the naked eye, as well as their apparent distribution on the sky.

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There are a lot of doomsday predictions in the XX century. Each of the predictions indicates its own date, but nothing have happened yet. You can find the List of doomsday predictions on Wikipedia. From the astronomers points of view the December 21 is interesting as the day of winter solstice. It is going to be the shortest day of the year. All scary predictions disasters for this day has no scientific basis. It is only a plot of imagination of fantasy writers. The most popular predictions are Nibiru's coming, geomagnetic reversal and planetary conjunction.

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Mars and Earth go around the sun like runners on a track: fast-moving Earth on the inside lane and slower-moving Mars on the outside. Every two years (on the average, every 780 days) Earth laps Mars and the two planets are close together. From Earth, Mars and the sun appear on opposite sides of the sky, hence astronomers say "Mars is at opposition".

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The appearance of myth about “Nibiru planet” which is connected with the End of the World can be associated with the revival of the old myth about “Nemesis star” with some modifications. You can compare both of them and you'll see that the myth about Nibiru tells about the planet which has a complete revolution in 3.6 thousand years and the Nemesis star – 32 millions years. In both cases authors mention the End of the World and catastrophic changes for Earth.

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