Moon
In 2005, the adaptive optics team at the Keck telescopes in Hawaii carried out observations of the four brightest TNOs (Pluto, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris), using the newly commissioned laser guide star adaptive optics system. Images taken on September 10 revealed a moon in orbit around Eris. In keeping with the "Xena" nickname already in use for Eris, Brown's team nicknamed the moon "Gabrielle", after the television warrior princess's sidekick. When Eris received its official name from the IAU, the moon received the name Dysnomia, after the Greek goddess of lawlessness who was Eris's daughter. Brown says he picked it for similarity to his wife's name, Diane. The name also retains an oblique reference to Eris's old informal name Xena, portrayed on TV by Lucy Lawless.
Read more about this topic: Eris (dwarf Planet)
Famous quotes containing the word moon:
“The moon is nothing
But a circumambulating aphrodisiac
Divinely subsidized to provoke the world
Into a rising birth-rate.”
—Christopher Fry (b. 1907)
“Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?
Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?
List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to
me.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Though it seems improbable on the face of it
You must master the huge retards and have faith in the slow
Blossoming of haystacks, stairways, walls of convolvulus,
Until the moon can do no more. Exhausted,
You get out of bed. Your project is completed
Though the experiment is a mess.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)