Astronomers want to rename galaxies because of 'violent colonialist legacy'

By 9News Staff
11:37am Nov 14, 2023

A group of astronomers is trying to change the name of the Milky Way's two brightest satellite galaxies because of the "violent colonialist" they are named after.

The push to rebrand the Large Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud, named after the 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, is being led by Dr Mia de los Reyes, an assistant professor of astronomy at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

Reyes recently published an op-ed in the journal APS Physics where she made her case for the proposed switch, branding Magellan "a coloniser, a slaver and a murderer" because of what he did while sailing around the world 500 years ago.

 
A first-hand account of Magellan's expedition detailed in Reyes' essay described how Magellan and his men enslaved the Tehuelche people in what is now Argentina.
"He placed iron manacles on the 'youngest and best proportioned' men, telling them that the manacles were gifts," the astronomer wrote.
"In what became Guam and the Philippines, Magellan and his men burnd villages and killed their inhabitants." 
   
Reyes wants Magellan's name stripped from the satellite galaxies and reportedly has the backing of up to 50 astronomers.
Complicating matters, Magellan's name is also attached to craters on the moon and Mars, the NASA Magellan spacecraft and various notable space telescopes.

The Portuguese became the first person to circumnavigate the globe, between 1519 and 1522.
During the expedition, a man on the ship wrote about two groups of stars that looked like clouds in the night sky in the Southern Hemisphere.


You'd think they'd have something better to do...

Ha! Great Topic Felon.
I was just thinking about telling Gonads about the story of the naming of the Galilean Moons in regards to the Uluru Topic in the Abo-mor-riginal Board - just moments before I saw this.

Galileo named the Jovian moons after the sons of some guy who funded him as a 'dick-suck'. Thankfully another Astronomer offered up a better alternative.

But in my view - Jupiter stands for the name of a Paedophile who poo-jabbed young boys called Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

Doesn't really do the mind well - knowing you're looking at a Planet and its Moons that promote Paedophilia.

I read this article. In the comments it was pointed out that this is the opinion of just two astronomers and there is no general feeling about this among the majority. However it is an indication of the lengths the woke mob will go to to rewrite history so we must be on our guard.