Uwingu Launches Contest to Name a Planet

I got a message from my old friend and CU colleague Alan Stern last week about Uwingu and he brought me up to speed on how it’s been going. You may recall I’ve written about this before — Uwingu is an imaginative crowd-funding site that supports space exploration, research and education and not just in name. Money donated through Uwingu’s unique crowd-sourcing projects go to help scientists to their work and share it with the world.

Uwingu has interesting perks if you contribute money. The latest is a chance to name the nearest Earth-sized planet, which just happens to be circling around the nearest star to the Sun, called Alpha Centauri B. The planet has a pretty prosaic name right now: Alpha Centauri Bb.   It doesn’t quite have the sexy sound of Earth, or Mars, or Saturn, or Uranus.  If you grew up on Alpha Centauri Bb, you’d probably have some other name for it. But, here on Earth, we need a more interesting name.

This is where Uwingu comes in. Starting today and continuing through April 15th, you can make a $4.99 donation that’ll cost you less than a fancy drink at a coffee shop and in return, you get to suggest a name for the planet. If you see a name that’s already been nominated, you can vote for it for only $0.99. Anyone can nominate names and vote for them. The name getting the most votes will be declared the public name for this world — which is kind of unique and cool. It’s the first time I can recall seeing a plebescite for a planet name.  And, even better, the person who comes up with the name that gets chose will win cool prizes from Uwingu.

Dr. Geoffrey Marcy, planet discoverer extraordinaire, thinks that the contest to name a planet is something that attracts people in a good way to science. People from everywhere can participate, he points out, “giving identities and even personality to billions of planets in our own galaxy.”

So, if Alan Stern is excited about this, and Geoffrey Marcy and I think it’s a cool idea, then here’s my recommendation: go check it out at Uwingu’s site.  A few bucks is a small price to pay to get the chance to give a deserving planet a name!  Plus, you’ll be funding cool science at the same time.

Check it out!