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After only a couple exoplanets (worlds in orbit around other stars) were "discovered" for the first time in the 90s (or rather, in most cases their existence is merely inferred - very few were actually observed), the catalogues boomed in the last decade -
- both thanks to stronger tech and targeted missions (like Kepler, that used transit imaging - observing regular dips in star magnitude - to infer a larger part of that). http://exoplanet.eu currently reports 4395 planets in 3242 systems. Nerds of course rejoiced.
So, in accordance with scifi tradition of giving planets fancy names that look meaningful (astronomers today generally prefer catalogue numbers for objects, e.g. Kepler-444 with planets b, c, d, e, and f), the IAU decided to do a publicity stunt and let the nerds pick some names.
They ran the first NameExoWorlds event in 2015 (in parallel with confirming some traditional names of stars, most of them coming from medieval Arabic tradition, as official designations), followed by another on in 2019, when a batch of systems was divided to member countries.
The countries almost universally decided on picking names relating to their local mythology, geography, literature, art, etc. (some of them more fortunate than others). Though English-speaking countries gave preference to pre-English traditions, geographically they still fit.
Except for… Germany. (Yep, even Sweden managed to reference its own literature.) Germany picked Mago and Neri. After Mago National Park and river Neri… in Ethiopia. (Ethiopia itself picked Buna and Abol - expecting to continue with Tona and Baraka - from their coffee tradition)
Congratulations to physics students at the Max-Born-Gymnasium Neckargemünd! I bet all those rightards are fuming now in reaction to your decision memoryhole your own country's existence.
