Speculoos-2c: A new potentially habitable earth

Re:Speculoos-2c: A new potentially habitable earth by Freak_NL on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @07:22AM (#32749148)

They named their project, and thus this object, after the popular Belgian¹ speculoos cookie and backronymed it. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I don't dislike names with some pop culture basis, or even better, old sci-fi (given that there a more of those objects than we can dream up names for). On the other hand, naming it after a cookie seems frivolous.

1: Known as speculaas in Dutch.

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Re:Speculoos-2c: A new potentially habitable earth by CaptArmchair on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @07:28AM (#32749197)

Well, they've already rounded that corner a while ago with TRAPPIST:

> TRAPPIST (TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope) is a project led by the Origins in Cosmology and Astrophysics group (OrCA) of the Department of Astrophysics, Geophysics and Oceanography (AGO) of the STAR Institute of the University of Liège (Belgium).

https://www.trappist.uliege.be/cms/c_5006023/en/trappist

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Re:Speculoos-2c: A new potentially habitable earth by eythian on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @07:47AM (#32749362)

Speculaas and Speculoos are somewhat different things. Speculaas is older and has more spices, apparently.

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Re:Speculoos-2c: A new potentially habitable earth by oboes on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @07:28AM (#32749194)

Another project from the same university is TRAPPIST. Named after Trappist beers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trappist_beer

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Re:Speculoos-2c: A new potentially habitable earth by Majestic121 on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @07:33AM (#32749239)

Don't worry, it will soon be integrated in Stellaris like the TRAPPIST one, so it will become pop culture/sci-fi

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Re:Speculoos-2c: A new potentially habitable earth by Bakary on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @08:45AM (#32749829)

I don't see how pop culture is a-okay as a naming scheme but this lekker cookie isn't. It is in fact pop-culture in its own way.

Sci-fi names tend to be tiresomely similar since they overuse gods names and anglocentric concepts

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