The recent announcement of the discovery of an icy, asteroid-sized object orbiting the Sun a billion miles beyond Pluto has created a stir in astronomy circles. This celestial neighbor is the most distant member of the solar system yet observed. The discovery was the result of a five-year search by David Jewitt, a University of Hawaii astronomer, and Jane Luu, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, for evidence supporting the theory that some comets, like the one named after Englishman Edmund Halley, come from a ring of icy material at the outer rim of the solar system.
The new find is too small to be a planet and too far away to be an ordinary asteroid. A new term may have to be coined for such objects, which seem to share qualities of both comets and asteroids. Meanwhile, the object has been given a tentative designation from the International Astronomical Union. The privilege of naming it goes to its discoverers once its orbit has been confirmed.
Finding a suitable moniker won't be all that easy, however. The convention of naming celestial bodies after figures from Greek and Roman mythology has run up against a problem: there aren't enough names to go around. So astronomers have borrowed from Teutonic legend, Shakespearean drama, even historical personages -- composer Richard Wagner has an asteroid named for him.