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A child’s poster of planets, stars and moons and a typo: sometimes, that’s all it takes to change our understanding of the solar system.
That’s what happened when Los Angeles-based writer and researcher Latif Nasser was putting his son to bed one night.
On a solar system poster hanging near his two-year-old son’s crib, Nasser, host of the Radiolab podcast and Netflix show Connected, saw a dot-sized moon near Venus called Zoozve. Venus had no moon… that he knew of. What was it?
Puzzled, Nasser began to investigate. He called scientists friends. What was Zoozve? There were no answers, only heads shaking in perplexity.
Even a friend from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was hampered.
Was it just a mistake, Nasser wondered? Well, it was and it wasn’t. Which was appropriate, because Zoozve (real name 2002 VE68) is and is not a satellite of Venus.
It orbits the Sun and also appears to orbit Venus and is therefore something called a quasi-moon. But it is much further away than a traditional moon; It will not remain in the orbit of Venus for long (7,000 years so far and about 500 years more, is the general consensus). And its main partner is not Venus, but the Sun.
Nasser finally discovered all of this when he contacted the artist who created the poster, Alex Foster. Foster recalled finding a list of the solar system’s moons online while he was illustrating the poster. He had the quasi-moon listed correctly in his notes; He misread his notes while he was creating the poster and Zoozve was born.
Nasser simply couldn’t believe it. Did everyone know about quasi-moons? he asked on his podcast and on his social media. What followed was an uproar. Almost what?
Science can be much more relatable if we let it be more human. (I’m not sure if we should say what Nasser says since he didn’t respond to us and doesn’t exactly say this in the podcast) There are mistakes, hidden facts, typos, and name calling.
In honor of this, and in the hope that more people would become interested in the strange and wonderful phenomena that unfold in the heavens, Nasser and his team at Radiolab wrote to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), asking if they would consider changing the name 2002. VE68 Zoozve.
The IAU is the global body responsible for naming major planets and their moons, defining planetary features, naming dwarf planets, meteor showers, comets, stars, constellations, asteroids, and objects outside the solar system. For asteroids, a combination of letters and numbers that follow a specific sequence tends to be used.
In February, the IAU officially recognized the 2002 VE68 as Zoozve, stating in its newsletter that “when artist Alex Foster drew this object on a children’s poster of the solar system, he mistook the initial characters of the provisional designation for letters, thus coining a strange and memorable nickname.”
Conversations like this unite even those who are somewhat curious about the world beyond our eyes, says Brian Skiff, a researcher at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, who discovered this particular quasi-moon (the first ever described) in 2002.
Many more have been found since then. It has been discovered that the Earth also currently has seven quasi-moons.
“I think the name change is a great way to spark interest in astronomy and all sciences. “I was a little surprised that they accepted the name, perhaps a testament to Nasser’s enthusiasm for his work,” he says. “This shows that what we thought were simple phenomena in the past turn out to be more complex than we originally imagined.”