Soccer Stars

You may have seen this week that a new galaxy has been named after Cristiano Ronaldo. Well, it’s technically named “CR7” which is his nickname/brandname, combining his initials and number. As you may know, he’s one of the sports megastars with his own symbol, which is a stylized CR7.

It's bad enough that we confuse him with Ronaldo, now we have a galaxy in his honour too. And there are so many galaxies out there that Ronaldo will eventually get his own, and that will surely lead to a massive war centuries from now.

And that's what's weird about this. For a while now they've been naming asteroids after people, and that seems reasonable. You're a good person; here, have a big rock. But galaxies? It may seem like a little smudge on the lens from our perspective, but it is a collection of billions of stars and planets. The billion-year-old collective experience of entire civilizations, and we named it after the second-best soccer player of his generation.

(Speaking of which, there's a list of major galaxies and other astronomical phenomena called the Messier objects. I tried to make a "Messi-eh" joke, couldn't make it work.)

Now really, this is unlikely to be a problem. If humanity survives and advances to the point where we could ever get to the Ronaldo galaxy, it will surely be so far into the future that our current names for things will be long forgotten. But who knows. In the same way we still use the name America long after we’ve forgotten what was so great about Amerigo Vespucci, these names could survive.

Sure, it may seem like there are lots of things out there to name after people. It’s estimated that there are far more galaxies out there than people on Earth, so we could afford to hand out galaxy names just for remembering to do a shoulder-check changing lanes. But if we were to expand through the cosmos, we’d run out of galaxies to name after ourselves, and then we’d regret wasting a bunch of them on athletes. "Well, Zartog, we appreciate your single-handedly saving the Stellar Alliance from the Jarfan raiders of the Beckham Galaxy, but we ran out of unnamed galaxies a few years ago. Here, have a rock."