Polish Names in Space

Here’s a fun article from Culture.pl reviewing planetary and space objects named after Polish artists, writers, musicians, composers and performers.

“We start off with the closest planet to the Sun. Mercury has a number of craters named after important Polish artists. In an area called the Shakespeare quadrangle, located at middle-latitude of the northern hemisphere of Mercury, there’s the Mickiewicz crater. It’s named after Poland’s eminent Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) who created pivotal works like the epic poem Pan Tadeusz and the four-part poetic drama Forefathers’ Eve. Mickiewicz is equally as important to Poles as Shakespeare is to Englishmen so it seems that this crater is located in an appropriate region. The Mickiewicz crater has a diameter of 100 km and was given its name in 1976.

“That same year, the Chopin crater was officially named after the world-famous Romantic pianist and composer Frederic Chopin (1810-1849). Among the most recognisable works by this amazing Polish artist are the dramatic Revolutionary Étude and the timeless Funeral March. The Chopin crater has a diameter of 131 kilometres and is located in the Michelangelo quadrangle, an area of Mercury in the planet’s southern polar region. One can imagine that the virtuoso Chopin wouldn’t have minded having a place named after him in an area whose namesake is the outstanding Michelangelo….”

For more named objects, read the entire article here.

What’s missing from the Culture.pl article is the brilliant Polish scientist and astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), who formulated a model of the universe that placed the sun rather than the earth at the center.

In 2015, the International Astronomical Union awarded the name Copernicus for 55 Cancri A (one half of a binary star system, the other being called 55 Cancri B), located in the constellation Cancer. The Copernicus star is orbited by five smaller planets called Galileo, Brahe, Lipperhey, Janssen and Harriot (designated Ab, Ac, Ad, Ae and Af, respectively). Click here for more details from Wikipedia.