The Moon?

Sorry if this is a silly question but, why is our Moon the only Moon that doesn't have a name? It's just called Moon.

Why do all the other planets moons have cool names like Europa,Io, and many others?

Moon is way cooler. That like became a definition of a planetary satellite.

Im pretty sure the moons name is Luna.
which is latin

on the planet venus dont you guys have a name for the moon?

[edit on 27-12-2007 by DalairTheGreat]

reply to post by Venusian12


The Moon has many names, it just depends what language you speak. There is no real proper English name other than "Moon". Before other natural satillites were discovered, ours was the only one called "the Moon", but then it just became a name to describe all natural satillites. You can, how ever, use the Latin name "Luna", as a name for the Moon.

EDIT: I see DalairTheGreat beat me to it by 2 minutes.


[edit on 27-12-2007 by jra]

Well the moon DOES have a latin name..

Luna

Edit: looks like i was beaten to it on that one

But it does through up the question..."when does a Moon become a Moon"??

Mars has two Moons, but they're are both "spud" like, unable to become spherical due to lack of mass.

They are "satalites", but what is a satallite?...something that orbits another body. But Phobos and Demos (mars' Moon/Satallites) a basically large asteroids, yet they are classed as "moons"

Jupiter, has 60 MOONS.!!! but surely some of those are spuds, so why not call them JUST satallites, as captured asteroids would be.

Jupiters SMALLEST moons are Euporie (JXXXIV, S/2001 J10), Orthosie (JXXXV, S/2001, J9), Pasithee (JXXXVIII, S/2001 J6), Kale (JXXXVII, S/2001 J8), Sponde (JXXXVI, S/2001 J5), S/2003 J9, and S/2003 J12.....

....All with a radius of 1km
Source

Now check out the list of ASTEROIDS on this Wikipedia list, although its a "notable" asteroid list, the smallest one on there is 158 km mean diameter,.....

Wiki...Notable Asteroids

SO WHAT the HELL are they doing, calling a 1km SPUD, a MOON of jupiter????

If we had a ONE KILOMETER spud orbiting OUR planet, we'd say .."Oh, thats a-bit bloody dangerous" but we would say " oh look, we got a new moon??

Crazy, with Pluto not even being classed as a planet any more, i think objective size when discussing ANY free floating body in space; is a bit of a grey area, i haven't got a clue what they doing, and i think neither do they.

Peace

AoN

[edit on 27-12-2007 by Anomic of Nihilism]

[edit on 27-12-2007 by Anomic of Nihilism]

[edit on 27-12-2007 by Anomic of Nihilism]

I say we give our Moon a name just like the rest of them.
We all post a name and then vote on the best one. And then just maybe it'll catch on and we can use that name everytime for our Moon.

I think we should name it " Cheese "

Earth has thousands of moons, the 2nd of which was called Sputnik 1.

reply to post by watch_the_rocks


LOL! Those are manmade satellites, our Moon is a natural satellite. How about we name it " Ziggy "

Technicalities aside, I always thought the official name for the moon was Luna?
Oh, who cares. It's a kickarse moon.

Well many scientists theorizing nowdays, say that our moon was form by an enormous impact of another planet (smaller than earth) but decent sized. They call it "Orpheus" , not sure on the spelling but i think that's right.

But their story goes that Orpheus hit the Earth at just the right angle that it didn't end up a ring system, but instead the debris supposedly
coalesced and formed our moon.

So if you wanna call it something, you could call it Orpheus I suppose.

I'm not too keen on the theory. But quite a few astro-physyscists(sp?), and scientists, geologists ect that I've seen on the Science channel and discovery channel seem to think of it as fact, that this is how our moon was born. *shrug*

It's a neat story, and could be true I guess, who knows.

reply to post by Nola213


Orpheus is cool! I watched that on the Discovery channel awhile back and remember that theory. Could be true ya never know?
Moon just doesn't sound good after Venusian12 posted this thread. I wonder if other life that's may or may not be out there has a name for our Moon. We name all the Moons we see except ours, so maybe they do the same.

La Luna is "the moon" in Spanish, Italian, etc.

La Lune, is French

As for others i dont know, but its not a proper name, its simply "the moon"

Take the sun, ... El Sol, Le soleil, bla bla bla...
It still only means the Sun.

No body thought of naming these two giants.