Regarding the discussion about planets and plutoids.

I've wondered a long time about 'moons'.
Not Ganymedes and Triton and Enceladus, but these tiny, non-spherical rocks called DSN-(89)-JU456636-7 and similar (exaggerating a bit).

Of course they should be registered somehow, maybe get real "names" but where's the limit?

Eventually we will find truck-sized moons, car-sized, baskeball-sized, banana-sized 'moons' orbiting planets (or plutoids) Pea-sized? When technology allows us to identify individual particles in the rings of Saturn....what about atoms...?...

If an astronaut, during an EVA, dies and ends up orbiting a planet - does he become a moon then? (No, an artifical satellite).

And certain moons might have their own tiny rocks orbiting them. What should we call those? Moonoids? Moonettes?

I'm sleepless over this...

One term which has been used in the past is 'moonlets'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlet
I seem to remember that one of Saturn's moons has a faint ring around it, which implies secondary moonlets are possible at least on a temporary basis.

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Ahh yes; Rhea may have a faint ring.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ca...a20080306.html

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Awww..... they could've called 'em Moonies!

Biosat, of which VTVFs (Very Tall Vertical Farms) are a small subset

I'm with you on this. It is ridiculous that every piece of rocky debris found around Jupiter/Saturn is dubbed a "moon". I've stopped paying attention to it. If it isn't big enough to take on a nearly spherical shape it shouldn't be called a moon IMO. Call it something else - moonlets, dwarf moons, dwarf satellites, moonies, space gravel, space guano .... anything but "Moon".

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Then there was this: UA Astronomers Discover That Earth's Second Moon Wears Apollo Paint

As someone mentioned, "moonlet" is a better term, particularly for small natural objects orbiting the Earth. The suffix "oid" means resembling, but not the real thing. The word "asteroid" refers to something that resembles a star in a telescope, but is not really a star. The prefix "andr" refers to a man, therefore an "android" (a robot) resembles a man, but is not really one.

Sometimes people assume that the suffix "oid" means small. It does not. This mistaken notion was perpetuated for several years by CNN's misuse of the word "factoid". A factoid is something that many people believe to be true, but is not. CNN used it to mean a small fact, so now many people misuse both the word factoid and its suffix "oid".

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Small precision: the suffix -oid means similar, and possibly identical. For example, we humans are hominoids, where homini- means 'human'.

This being said, I much prefer 'moonlet' to 'moonoid'. Given my background, the latter would always make me think of a monoid first.

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American Heritage Stedman's Medical Dictionary - Cite This Source - Share This
-oid
suff.
Resembling; one that resembles: cancroid.

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing - Cite This Source - Share This
OID
object identifier
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2007 Denis Howe
Jargon File - Cite This Source - Share This -oid suff. [from Greek suffix -oid = `in the image of'] 1. Used as in mainstream slang English to indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or some otherwise slightly bogus resemblance. Hackers will happily use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words that wouldn't keep company with it in mainstream English. For example, "He's a nerdoid" means that he superficially resembles a nerd but can't make the grade; a `modemoid' might be a 300-baud box (Real Modems run at 28.8 or up); a `computeroid' might be any bitty box. The word `keyboid' could be used to describe a chiclet keyboard, but would have to be written; spoken, it would confuse the listener as to the speaker's city of origin. 2. More specifically, an indicator for `resembling an android' which in the past has been confined to science-fiction fans and hackers. It too has recently (in 1991) started to go mainstream (most notably in the term `trendoid' for victims of terminal hipness). This is probably traceable to the popularization of the term droid in "Star Wars" and its sequels.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This
hom·i·nid Audio Help /ˈhɒmənɪd/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[hom-uh-nid] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun Anthropology. any of the modern or extinct bipedal primates of the family Hominidae, including all species of the genera Homo and Australopithecus.

hom·i·noid Audio Help /ˈhɒməˌnɔɪd/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[hom-uh-noid] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun Anthropology. a member of the biological superfamily Hominoidea, including all modern great apes and humans and a number of their extinct ancestors and relatives.

Yes, the larger group hominoid includes hominids, which in turn includes humans. The implication in the term hominoid is that all species "resembling" hominids are included. The “possibly identical” use of “oid” is unusual. In any event, hominoid does not mean small hominid or small human. The point of this discussion is that moonoid would not mean small moon.

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If we use that definition, then Mars' captured asteroids would no longer be moons. And all the people that learned in school that Mars has two moons would be up in arms about it and argue about it endlessly.

I think we've been down this path before...

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Sorry, Centaur, that was a slip of the brain. I've corrected my post to what I meant to say...

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My objection is to the application of the word moon to anything but The Moon. Often on astronomical message boards we get people asking why the Moon has no name of its own. That is because they so often hear the word moon applied to the natural satellites of other planets.

Before Galileo trained a telescope on Jupiter, the name Moon applied to no object other than the long familiar one. At first the bodies orbiting Jupiter were called various types of stars. Star was then a generic term for almost any type of celestial body. Then later in the 17th century a French mathematician applied to them the word satellite, which meant attendant. That term has stuck right up to this day.

In earlier centuries the word moon was occasionally applied to natural satellites of other planets, but not terribly often. However, after artificial satellites began being launched fifty years ago, some young people began growing up thinking all satellites were artificial. Besides, moon was easier for journalists to spell. It was after that that we started hearing the word moon being applied to natural satellites much more frequently. Nevertheless, to me there will always be only one Moon.

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Understood. No problem. I've done things like that myself.

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Absolutely, I think it is ridiculous that the objects orbiting Mars are called "moons". They should not be "moons". Classification systems will always have borderline objects, so revising the current system wouldn't eliminate all debate, but we have "dwarf planets" so why not have "dwarf moons" for those objects that do not have sufficient mass to manage a spherical shape.

That's my opinion.

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"The scientist who asks the right question reconnoiters a new patch of the unknown, and may, with luck, bring it within the constricted but expanding boundaries of the known."

~Timothy Ferris (The Red Limit) 1982

Nice!

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"The scientist who asks the right question reconnoiters a new patch of the unknown, and may, with luck, bring it within the constricted but expanding boundaries of the known."

~Timothy Ferris (The Red Limit) 1982

That's true -- but astronomers would have to change first. Chaisson&McMillan refer to "Moons" and "Moon systems" in their textbook Astronomy Today.

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"The scientist who asks the right question reconnoiters a new patch of the unknown, and may, with luck, bring it within the constricted but expanding boundaries of the known."

~Timothy Ferris (The Red Limit) 1982

Every zoological superfamily is called Something-oidea (where something is the stem of the name of the type genus, Homo, stem homin- in the case of the Hominoidea) and its members something-oids. This surely is quite distinct from the general derivational suffix -oid (as in humanoid "human-like").

(To keep you guessing, there are also a few higher taxa with names in -oidea. The most obnoxious one, by quite some distance, is the Asteroidea, or starfish. Yes, biologists do sometimes call starfish "asteroids".)

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