Funny

Rant? Oh don't get me started on how we're dropping the ball on the naming of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. This is by far the largest object in the entire galaxy. The center of centers. The pit at the bottom of the world. The bottomless pit that pulled the whole galaxy together. The monster of monsters. The terror of terrors. The thunder upon the deep. The ravenous maw that devours entire Suns. And what name do we call it? What ancient monster or demon do we invoke to give voice to the howling terror around which the galaxy revolves? None. We call the bloody thing Sagittarius A*.

Yes, that's it. That's as good as astronomers can do right now apparently. How could you call such an unholy terror a name that's more appropriate to an IRS accounting file? How could you use such a mundane name when Charybdis is right there! Or Scylla works too!

Like JFC. Where's the sense of romance? Where's the passion and the fire? We're talking an object with the mass of three million Suns. It has a whole retinue or stars that orbit around it, and it throws them around like playthings. The Earth and the Sun already dwarf humanity to cosmic minutia, and this monster does the same to them. It's a monster lurking in the depths of space. And the best we can do to name it is fucking Sagittarius A*. The thing is a literal cosmic monster, something right out of mythology.

Like, I'm not even some Eurocentric who thinks everything needs to be named after Roman or Greek sources. I like keeping the planets specifically Roman for consistency. But there are no shortage of wonderful names out there coming from other mythologies. Laniakea is a beautiful name. And I would be fine with naming the big black hole after some terrifying monster in any number of mythologies. But we have to stop calling it A*. It's just wrong.