My eyesight is terrible. When I go to the opticians for a new prescription as opposed to handing over the new one, they use a special chart with a single letter filling all of it and ask me if I can see it at all, and the answer is always no. Because of this, as a child I expected to go blind and trained myself to find my way around without looking, which annoys Sarada as it seems to mean I notice details more than I do large objects, although that’s probably partly an aspect of my neurodivergence.
Therefore, in general when I look up at the night sky without binoculars or a telescope, I see very little because the starlight is too blurry if I don’t wear glasses and if I do the lenses cut out most of the light. Most of the time, it’s hardly mattered because, for example, in Loughborough the sky was overcast at night or ruined by street lamps. However, here in southwest Scotland, the situation is different, rather like that in and around Herstmonceux, where I trained as a herbalist and where the Greenwich Observatory was moved when the skies got too bright. This region is one of the dark sky sanctuaries, although apparently it gets darker even than this a little to the west:
Compare this to South to Mid-Wales, the South of England and the English Midlands:
Much of Devon and mid-Wales are fine there, but I’ve never lived anywhere near them, and the area around Herstmonceux is now pretty much the same as the rest of the South nowadays.
Surprisingly, on looking at the sky here, as I did the night before last, through binoculars and with my eyes plus spectacles, I was able to perceive another, well, spectacle in the form of a clear sky and a vista out into the local arm of the Galaxy, as well as of our closer neighbours Mars and Jupiter. The lunar absence helped but the magnification of the binoculars decidedly didn’t, as it was impossible for me to hold them steadily enough to see either planet clearly. For some reason the binoculars I use are 16 x, which I understand are usually mounted on a tripod for this reason but they don’t have anywhere to screw them in. I’m guessing you can get a frame of some kind to address this issue but I don’t think I have one. Frustratingly, I finally found the telescope yesterday, too late to aim it at the sky on that particular occasion but tomorrow is another night.
It was helpful that Mars was so clearly visible. I understand it’s currently near opposition, i.e. about as near as it gets, because it’s quite distinctive and enabled me to find Castor and Pollux, as it’s currently in Gemini, which in turn helped me find something I’ve never managed to see before: Praesepe, also known as the Beehive Cluster. Before I dilate on this, I want to point out that turning one’s attention to the stars is a fantastic escape from the troubles of this microscopic blue dot, and perhaps also a unifying factor, but there is unfortunately nowadays a fly in the ointment because of Elon Musk’s satellites interfering with a clear view of everything. However, I don’t want to dwell on that.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the bundle of eggs a spider lays – a ball made up of the mother’s embryonic young yet to hatch. When they do emerge, they scatter themselves having eaten the mother’s body, at least according to ‘Blade Runner’ if that’s not a false memory. This brings to mind how stars form in globular clusters like this:
Sid Leach/Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter
After a while, they fly apart and the result is an open cluster like the aforementioned Beehive. Other nearby examples are the Pleiades and Hyades, quite nearby in our sky. Cancer, the constellation where the Beehive is, is generally quite dim and I had the impression that the cluster was too but apparently its total brightness is something like 3.7. I should explain what this means. The faintest stars visible to the naked eye of someone with good eyesight are of magnitude six, and the brightest, one hundred times brighter, are around magnitude zero, an example being Vega. This makes it a logarithmic scale with each step around two and a half times that of the one above. It also illustrates that we perceive things such as brightness on a logarithmic rather than linear scale, and a similar scale for sound volume, decibels (which are not actually a unit of loudness but it’s too involved to explain here), doubles every three, so 86 decibels is twice as loud as 83. I’m just going to say one more thing about decibels which indicates their oddness: how far from the sound source are you when you judge it? A seventy decibel sound ten metres away becomes a seventy-six decibel sound five metres away because it’s four times as loud. But does it?
Praesepe, the Beehive, is a fuzzy patch in Cancer around six hundred light years away larger than the Sun looks in our sky, with a magnitude of 3.7. That means that all the stars together are that bright, and it’s the area which is that bright rather than the mean magnitude of all the stars in the cluster. There are supposed to be about two hundred stars in it altogether, although being an open cluster its edges are vague, although it’s about twenty light years in diameter. “Praesepe” means “manger” or “crib” (I’m from Kent so I say “manger” for both, which I suspect is dialect and I’ve never used it outside Kent, but I don’t honestly know), and it is in fact a nursery for stars, so it’s peculiarly appropriate. You only get one chance to use that though, so although the other open clusters are also nurseries they can’t be called that too. The Pleiades or Seven Sisters, probably the best known open cluster, consists of stars which are mainly roughly the same size and temperature as each other, being blue giants, but the Beehive is not like that. The Seven Sisters are actually younger than the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, but the Beehive is about six hundred million years old, so it’s considerably older than the first trilobites. It varies a lot more, containing white dwarfs, red giants and also yellow dwarfs, which are Sun-like stars. Moreover, several of these stars are known to have planets and one of them has at least two if I remember correctly (I always write this stuff off the cuff). However, as is very common, they’re all “hot Jupiters”, that is, they are red hot, partly vapourised planets which would’ve been rocky at a greater distance. Using the current popular method, hot Jupiters are easier to detect than other exoplanets because they’re large and closer to their suns, as it involves measuring fluctuations in brightness, which is likelier to be detected if the planet is relatively large compared to its primary and orbits it quickly. The planet also needs to be orbiting edge-on to our view. There are other ways of detecting planets but they haven’t been used for decades, and when they were it turned out they produced spurious results, such as simply recording when the lenses in telescopes were cleaned and put back at a different angle! Nowadays, it seems feasible that they would work, so I don’t know why they’re not using them.
There are roughly a thousand stars in an approximate sphere with a radius of ten light years, and those are just the ones detected from Earth. There are probably more because many of the known closest stars to our solar system are red dwarfs, the lightest and smallest stars, and the smaller a star type is, the more common it tends to be. A sphere with a radius of ten light years has a volume of around 4200 cubic light years, and with two hundred stars in the cluster that means a cube with a volume of 4.2 cubic light years on a side would contain on average one star and the mean distance between stars in the cluster would be only 1.6 light years. However, if they’re anywhere near randomly distributed, that distance is likely to vary quite a lot although the centre of the cluster might be denser, as can be seen from the photograph if those alignments are not optical illusions. There are many optical double stars in general which just happen to be along the same line of sight. This means that even given the known stars, which include red giants, the sky of a planet in the cluster would be a lot fuller and brighter than Earth’s, always assuming its atmosphere isn’t too dense or cloudy to see through and that it isn’t very close to its own sun. If we were that distance from α Centauri, it would be about as bright as Venus and capable of casting shadows, and if a red giant the size of Arcturus were involved it would be getting on for lunar level brightness and light up the whole sky.
Back in the 1960s or possibly the ’70s, a nuclear-powered starship called Daedalus was designed which couldn’t be built because it would violate treaties on nuclear weapons. However, if it had been, it could’ve reached the nearest star within fifty years. In a cluster such as this, it might take only twenty years to get there, which is a much more manageable interval. There are Sun-like stars in the Beehive and there’s no reason to suppose they don’t have Earth-like planets circling them, perhaps many such planets throughout the cluster. And there’s more.
One thing which really stimulates evolution here on Earth is frequent mass extinctions. For instance, something massive hit this planet sixty-six million years ago which led to the ascendance of the mammals. Various other causes led to other mass extinctions, some possibly due to other impacts. Had none of that happened, evolution might not have led to us appearing because life would’ve been too easy on this planet. Hardship and adverse circumstances lead to creativity here too. Furthermore, Earth is unusual in having a large moon, due again to a major impact, this time from an object the size of Mars, which led to the development of a strong magnetic field protecting us from ionising radiation. All of those events are more likely in the cluster due to its crowded nature, with stars interfering with each others’ comets and asteroids, but as said before, it’s only six hundred million years old and it seems unlikely that there could’ve been enough stimuli for even the simplest multicellular life forms to have evolved in that time. However, if that did happen in such a cluster, interstellar travel would be far easier to achieve than we find it, as would observation of other star systems. For instance, planets orbiting a Sun-like star would be on average sixteen times brighter when observed from adjacent star systems than they would be from α Centauri.
As I’ve said before, I try not to focus too much on life, intelligent life, life as we know it or humanoid life on this blog because that’s a bias which I think makes the Universe less interesting, and the emphasis on life is a bit anthropocentric and perhaps also rather science fictional.
Half the mass of the cluster is contained within 12.7 light years of the centre and its gravity is capable of pulling stars towards it from thirty-nine light years away. There are also stars moving through it which have no real association with it. It shares motion with the Hyades, the closest star cluster of any kind to us, and its composition is similar, so they were probably once part of the same structure. They are only 150 light years away from us.
I am of course incredibly White, so the immediate question here is why a White non-astronomer is qualified to talk about racism in astronomy. Well, strictly speaking of course I can’t really, or rather, I am unlikely to be able to wade into it in enough depth to swim knowledgeably. Nonetheless I can give a kind of overview of it and comment on some of the active racism involved.
This is a time lapse picture of the night sky. The main reason we can know it was taken here on Earth, apart from the fact that astronomical pictures taken from other celestial bodies are rare and poor quality (in fact I only know of one body they have been taken from, and that’s Mars) is the colour of the sky and the presence of liquid and solid on the surface at the bottom of the picture. It also seems to have been taken from the northern hemisphere because of the relatively stable and bright streak at the centre, which is presumably Polaris. Had it been taken from the south, the much dimmer Sigma Octantis would be at the centre of the swirl.
The sky seems non-specific and impassive to us, and also very little influenced by conflict or politics going on here on Earth among humans, and that is one reason I’m so keen on astronomy. Contemplating the Universe makes the problems we have here seem less important and seems to put them in perspective. I would personally say the stars are something to aspire to. I so want there to be humans out there among them one day. Of course, we are already among the stars but apparently only one of them hosts us. Nevertheless, there are cultural dominances and biasses in how we view the Universe and also very clear and overt racism exists among the astronomical community.
This sounds like an accusation, as the words “racism”, “sexism”, “ableism” and others often do, but that would imply that people are consciously and deliberately reserving much of the academic world to White people. That may happen as well, but it’s more important to look at the issue as a structural thing. As a White person, I have the privilege of firstly being unaware of racial bias among astronomers and secondly of being able to contemplate astronomy in a meaningful way. There are other ways in which I am trivially disadvantaged to do with my situation. For instance, I can’t see objects in the night sky very easily because of my poor eyesight, so the best I can usually manage to do is to view maybe first magnitude stars such as Antares, and basically nothing else. This is more on the disability side than ethnicity of course, but there is another set of issues which is fairly obvious to me regarding gender, namely that a man may feel much more confident to go out at night to a park or remote area to look at the sky in a place without light pollution than a woman might, and beyond that the kind of systemic biasses which prefer able-bodied middle-aged WASP men work against women, the disabled and ethnic minorities. Hence in the richer parts of the world, Black people are likely to live in places with more light pollution and less likely to be able to afford a good telescope. Ironically, much of Afrika, for example, would be very suitable indeed for telescopic astronomy. Here’s a map of the continent showing lighting at night:
(would’ve been better without the labels). And here’s Europe:
This means that treating every location as equally likely, which is not so because of lack of population, one stands a much better chance of seeing the night sky well in Afrika than in Europe. Also, along the Equator one can see both celestial hemispheres, so one can see more of it in Afrika than Europe.
There will inevitably be systemic racism in who becomes an astronomer in Europe and North America, although I’m guessing this isn’t any worse than who becomes a palaeontologist. The latter presents a rather different problem as there are issues regarding the plunder of resources by colonialists and the treatment of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in the field, which may not be so big a problem with astronomy. However, there can be problems with the siting of observatories in a similar sense, the most well-known one at the moment being the positioning of the Thirty Metre Array in Hawai’i, which was to be situated on Mauna Kea, a sacred site to the people of that archipelago. The issue here is that the planned observatory is one of several near that site, and in the past the excavation of the site has desecrated the graves of ancient high chiefs. In the past, promises regarding the building of telescopes have been broken, with insistence that this would be the last development, followed by more of the same. The northern hemisphere is low in such observatories, and a possible alternate site in La Palma in the Canary Islands is less suitable for infrared astronomy due to the warmer climate and lower elevation. Mauna Kea is the highest mountain on Earth measured from its base, so there’s less atmosphere to look through. There is a peaceful protest ongoing there. Some of the indigenous people view the idea of looking for other habitable planets as encouraging an attitude that Earth is disposable. Despite losing their case in the courts, the actions taken to build the observatory seem to meet the legal definition of desecration. Elders in their seventies and eighties have been arrested for peaceful protests, and because the site is sacred all protestors are committed to non-violence. This has also divided the community as the police officers are sometimes related to the protestors. Beyond that is the issue of how the United States government acquired the islands in the first place, on the grounds that the White businessmen were more fit to run the island than the recently independent natives. The federal government also had no legal jurisdiction over the country.
This story makes me wonder about whether there are other observatories with similar histories. There is also a separate issue regarding the Arecibo Telescope, which is an enormous radio telescope built in a basin in Puerto Rico. This was used to send the first message into interstellar space for detection by aliens, although it was only a semi-serious attempt for publicity purposes. In 2020 CE, the telescope collapsed, primarily due to lack of funding making maintenance unaffordable. Like Hawai’i, part of the rhetoric for siting the telescope there is that it brings money into the local economy, but that money is no longer forthcoming. Elsewhere on the planet, the Karoo Square Kilometre Array in South Africa requires a 13 000 hectare “quiet zone” which minimises electromagnetic transmissions to enable the telescopes to detect signals from the sky more easily. The San used to live in this region and were forced to move north by the colonial government in the century before last, and there’s the issue of purchase of the land from White farmers to prevent radio interference. Employment is low and deprivation high in the area, and it’s possible that building the extra telescopes may lead to jobs. The San were, however, displaced when the government brought Black farmers to the area some time ago. The SKA is situated where it is thanks to a government bidding process which brought it into the area.
Then there’s the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. This was afflicted in 2013 by a workers’ contract dispute between the Washington CD-based organisation which runs the facility and the four-fifths of employees at the site who are Chilean. All of these things taken together look like a process where scientific institutions in the wealthy and light-polluted (and also electromagnetic radiation more generally) North of the planet uses places with colonial histories to site its astronomical facilities, without much respect being paid to the people who actually live there. As I say, I don’t know much about these things but it seems to be a clear example of racism in astronomy. The Polynesian people and the San do of course also have their own astronomical traditions. Western astronomers were not the first.
In 2017, only nine percent of US STEM academics were POC. The Black population of the US is 13.6%. As for Black women, only sixty-six of them got doctorates in physics compared to 27 000 White men. This is not about problematising STEM departments or the scientific community in particular, but in a racist society this kind of disparity can be expected if nothing is done to address it. In general, diversity is an asset because new perspectives can be brought to bear on research, so this is not simply about justice for ethnic minorities but about having a well-functioning scientific discipline. Problems encountered in physics and astronomy for POC include microaggressions from White students, not feeling welcomed or included, imposter syndrome, a lack of role models, financial struggles and an absence of academic support. There is a second problem with examining racism specifically in astronomy caused by the tendency for physics and astronomy to be lumped together, perhaps because physics is perceived as a more “useful” subject, and it may also be that astronomers are less aware of the need to combat racism in their discipline than physicists. Researchers into the issue have not managed to visit astronomy departments as easily as physics ones, meaning that no firm conclusions can be drawn about the relative differences.
The White Florida emeritus astronomy professor Haywood Smith has state
d that he does not believe systemic racism exists at a time when only two percent of American astronomers are Black. His own department had had one Black employee, in admin, hired in the early 1990s. On the positive side, Black students report that the environment in the department is generally very positive and supportive. However, I can’t help but be reminded of Patrick Moore, who was chair of the right wing United Country Party, which opposed immigration. He was also an admirer of Enoch Powell, condemned the Race Relations Act and regarded the absolute monarchy of Liechtenstein as the “best political system in the world”. This last point is more complex, mainly because Liechtenstein is a microstate, but it still means that, like Britain, Liechtenstein’s head of state is very likely always to be White.
It would be unfair to use both of these astronomers as typical of their profession. Even so, it does remind me of the interesting phenomenon of right wing animal liberationists. There are people whom I might describe as “animal lovers” who look at the world very differently than I do, and whose veganism, if that’s an accurate description, is also very different to mine. For instance, there are some animal liberationists who are anti-abortion and see that as consistent, and there’s also an attitude that whereas humans are terrible, and behave terribly towards each other, other species do not perpetrate deliberate cruelty but simply try to survive and thrive, and take care of their offspring. For such people, other species seem to constitute a similar escape from the woeful interaction of human beings with each other as astronomy does for me. Maybe actively racist White astronomers are similar. I don’t feel I’ve exactly captured the issue, but I can see the sense in this apparently incongruous juxtaposition.
The way it might work for White astronomers is that they want to rise above this morass of apparent nonsense that infests the world, but their nonsense is not the same as my nonsense. Mine is the endless grind of global capitalism, greed and hatred between groups to ensure divided opposition to oppression. Theirs is a reflection of the privilege which enabled them to become astronomers in the first place. It could also be a kind of innocence. They may be so focussed on the stars that they’re oblivious of what’s happening on the ground. But it’s been said that not taking a position in a dispute about oppression is taking the side of the oppressor. Some might also say that there’s an issue with even having astronomy departments “when the world’s in such a mess”. I completely disagree with this though, because awareness of the existence of the rest of the cosmos has a function similar to spirituality and art in allowing one to continue and cope in order to continue fighting for a better world. Being a science, astronomy also has the usual function of science in training people in critical thinking. This is how astronomy graduates will be coming out the other end of the degree machine, whether or not they use their qualification vocationally. Astronomy is also just plain useful, for instance in detecting asteroids hurtling towards the planet and wiping out all life as we know it.
Another aspect of astronomy and racism is the question of sky cultures and names for objects. I’ve already mentioned the Square Kilometre Array and the observatories on Mauna Kea. Both of these are unsurprisingly both associated with indigenous communities, namely the San and Polynesians respectively. A sky culture is how a particular culture sees the sky. There are several Polynesian sky cultures just as there are many Polyesian languages. It could be expected that a set of people who have settled in various places across the Pacific and Indian Oceans would have a highly disparate set of cultures. The Austronesian language family had the largest geographical range of any language family before colonialism: Hawai’i and Madagascar both speak Austronesian languages and are 17 000 kilometres apart. Their broad distribution is a factor in their astronomy, as it was important to have some understanding of constellations in order to navigate. In order to record the positions of the stars, some Polynesians used “stick charts”, made from palm fronds, cowries and plant cordage:
Curved links indicate ocean currents and winds and the charts are effectively maps of the ocean. Pacific Islands tend to be around one to three hundred kilometres apart with the exception of such outliers as Hawai’i. The information was memorised and navigators were also spiritual and political leaders, navigation being a spiritual and religious act. Astronomy was part of this. Guiding stars were used when low in the sky, with imaginary vertical lines projected onto the horizon to indicate direction, but these move as the night goes on due to the rotation of the planet. The direction indicated by the star is maintained until another star rises. The paths between these stars are referred to as “kavenga” – “star paths” – named after the brightest star and all stars are referred to by the name of the brightest. However, these are not applicable all year round, so the year is divided into four unequal seasons with different kavenga. These are Ke Ka O Makali’i (the northern winter – Hawai’i has no seasons of course), Ka Iwikuamo’o (northern spring), Manaiakalani (northern summer) and the overlapping Ka Lupu O Kawelo (northern autumn into winter, including some of Ke Ka O Makali’i). Kavenga could also be kept on one side or other of the boat, or the boat could be aimed between two kavenga. There is also the star compass, which uses the presence of Polaris and Crux Australis, as we in the West call them, and the stars around them as they rise and set, to locate the north and south celestial poles. They also picked out a number of other asterisms (star patterns), including what we call Orion’s Belt, Scorpio, and the Pleiades, and used their rising and setting to mark another six points on the horizon and construct the directions in which other stars were since their positions would then be known. This enables the navigator to find out where the boat is when the sky is partly cloudy. There are also, unsurprisingly, stories associated with the star paths and asterisms. Apart from being meaningful in other ways, these serve as mnemonics for the location of the star paths.
There isn’t time to cover all Polynesian sky cultures here, so I will now move on to the San. Although it must be remembered that the biological construction of ethnicity as race is distinctly dubious, politically speaking, it’s also worth noting the identity of the San, whose genetic profiles are highly unusual. The San appear to be the group genetically closest to the earliest examples of Homo sapiens. Both their Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA branched off early from the rest of the species and they seem to have diverged from about two hundred millennia in the past. They’re also the most diverse group of humans genetically. Two San can be as different generically from each other as two randomly chosen people from anywhere on Earth. Besides this, albinos are unusually common among them. I mention all this to indicate that they are very much not simply Black people even though Europeans might lump all Afrikans who are not fair-skinned together. They have a very distinct identity. Afrikans generally are more genetically diverse than the rest of the human race, so as I’ve said previously, if you want a construction of race based on genetics, and I don’t really know why you would, it makes sense to see Afrika as including about ten ethnicities and the rest of the world about fourteen, but with entire continents in some cases only having a couple, so the human race basically consists of a series of genetic groups which often vary in skin tone and other features within those groups plus a large number of mainly dark-skinned groups all of whom originate recently from Afrika. The idea of skin tone as a major feature distinguishing ethnicities makes no genetic sense, and of course people don’t just “breed” within their own hermetically sealed racial units.
One tantalising possibility exists regarding San sky lore, which is that it may be directly descended from early human mythology. On the other hand, behavioural modernity seems to have appeared after the split between them and the rest of the species, so maybe not. One difficulty with recovering it is that Christian missionaries have obscured and suppressed the content, but one story is that a woman was baking a root vegetable on a fire and wouldn’t let her daughter eat it, so the daughter kicked at the fire and scattered the ashes across the night sky, forming the Milky Way, and the red embers formed the red stars in the sky. Kham (the Moon, Cynthia) is a man who has angered the Sun, gains weight each month and then is cut away by the Sun until only the backbone is left, and he pleads that this crescent he has become be left for his children, who then repeat the cycle. The Sun, in a possibly different tribal tradition, becomes a rhino at sunset, is eaten by a different tribe who then throw her scapula over to the east, where it becomes a new animal and rises again. The celestial bodies are the elder race and all personified. The Sun, and again this seems to be a different tradition, is a man with luminous armpits, armpits being considered a source of sweat which contains supernatural power, who refused to share his light to dry out the termites for eating, so the first San threw him into the sky so that his armpits could illuminate the world. The “Moon”, is the shoe of a male trickster deity, /kaggen, the name literally meaning “mantis”, who threw it into the sky, and an alternate theory is that it’s an ostrich feather also throw into the sky by /kaggen, who commanded it to become that celestial body. All of /kaggen his possessions are magically intelligent and the “Moon” alone speaks using a retroflex click. Like many other cultures, there is an association between a lagomorph, this time a hare, and this luminary. The spirits of the dead are carried by the dark side, so the full phase is considered good luck for hunting, as is a blood moon. The stars are named after various animals such as lions, antelopes and tortoises, and a stone used for digging. For them, the sky was a stone dome with holes in it through which the Sun shone. The three stars of Orion’s belt are zebras, the Pleiades the daughters of the deity of the dawn and sky, Tsui. Her unnamed husband is Aldebaran. Betelgeuse is a lion who is also stalking the zebras, so Aldebaran can’t get them without getting killed, so he’s slowly starving to death.
There’s quite a contrast, then, between the sky cultures of the Polynesians and those of the San, and of course there are plenty of others, but the dominant one, used by Western astronomers, is of course the Greco-Roman and more widely European eighty-eight classical constellations with stars named using Greek letters, numbers and often Arabic names. The presence of Arabic in this system demonstrates how the Arab world didn’t go into the Dark Ages like Christendom and for a long time their astronomy was more advanced than ours. There is a clear division in the names of the constellations between north and south because of what was visible from the Med at the time, so the zodiacal and the more prominent northern constellations were given names by the Greeks and Romans, but there are also fainter northern constellations with newer names and the southern names, also given by Westerners, tend to be very different. Some are neutral and uncontroversial, such as Crux Australis and Triangulum Australe, and the southern polar constellation is called Octans due to its obvious association with navigation. Several others have nautical or navigational names, such as Sextans, Quadrans (which is obsolete), Pyxis (the Compass), and some more are named after birds such as Tucana and Apus. The rather dim Indus was named by a Dutch astronomer and is clearly supposed to represent an individual of non-European origin, but their exact ethnicity is unclear due to the practice of referring to native Americans as “Indians”. There are also some obsolete constellations, one of which, Quandrans, has already been mentioned. Unfortunately one of these is Antinous, the homosexual lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. There was also a pangolin, and some others whose names seem perfectly normal and acceptable, such as the Cat, the Bee and the Sundial. Others used to be nationalistic or partisan, such as Sobieskii’s Shield, now known simply as the Shield, and Charles’s Oak. Also, in the seventeenth century, an attempt was made by one astronomer to give all the constellations Christian designations, replacing the northern constellations with New Testament names, the southern with Old Testament ones and the zodiac with the twelve apostles. This is a diffeent kind of cultural bias.
I’m sure there’s plenty more to be said about racism and astronomy, but I want to finish by mentioning the recent renaming of certain celestial objects such as NGC 2392, formerly known as “The Eskimo Nebula”. The name “Esquimau” is considered racist because it isn’t what the Inuit call themselves and it was widely believed to mean “eater of raw flesh”. In fact, it may not do but instead may be derived from “Ayeshkimu”, meaning “netters of snow shoes”. However, whatever its origin it’s considered as a colonial term with a racist origin by the Inuit, so the colloquial name has now been replaced by the New General Catalogue number. Similarly NGC 4567 and 4568, twin galaxies, were formerly referred to as the “Siamese Twin Galaxies”, which has again now been dropped. NASA also has an Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity which addresses issues affecting marginalised groups.
As I said at the start of this post, I am not really the right person to be talking about racism in astronomy as I am White and not an astronomer, but I hope I’ve been able to provide some kind of sketchy survey of some of the issues involved. There’s bound to be a lot more.
A Box Of Chocolates 