Whence IAU authority? (and why I’m not pro-NameExoWorlds)

I had an interesting exchange with Christian Marois and Eric Mamajek on The FaceBook thing, and it helped clarify my thinking on the issue of the IAU naming exoplanets.

Christian mused about the ultimate source of the IAU’s authority; how it is that a subset of astronomers get to decide standards for the rest of us.  Alan Stern is on record being very very grumpy about the whole matter, especially as it relates to Pluto’s planethood and its treatment of Uwingu.

I decided that I knew of only two mechanisms of IAU authority:

1) Journal enforcement. A&A (and the AAS journals, too, I think, though I can’t find the evidence right now) requires that names conform with IAU recommendations.  This makes sense as a way to keep the literature clean and consistent.

2) The consent of the governed. The IAU has responsibly managed things like asteroid names and time conventions for a long time, and it’s more valuable for a practitioner to acquiesce to a reasonable community consensus they disagree with, than for them to set a precedent where it’s every astronomer for themself, or set up factions that use inconsistent standards and names.

Consulting discoverers on the topic of exoplanet nomenclature is consistent with past practice and a way of preserving its authority under point 2) above.  If the process is seen as the forging of a consensus among interested parties, then it will have their buy-in.  In other words, when the people whose consent matters most are the people generating the consensus, then the system works.

What might not work is if the IAU makes ill-informed decisions that leave out the voices of the people most affected by its decisions; if it is seen by astronomers not as a forum for consensus but as an unaccountable body imposing arbitrary decisions by fiat.

I think this is why I was disturbed and confused by Thierry Montmerle’s note to me that included the passage:

So, in a way, the list [of exoplanets that the IAU is naming] is “public domain”, except that no one else is allowed to use it for the moment. You can call it also a “transfer of intellectual property to the IAU”, much like the “copyright” transferred to the IAU by authors of articles appearing in its publications like Symposia.

I was first hung up on the idea that naming exoplanets somehow involves the “intellectual property” of the exoplanets, but this issue doesn’t involve any legal sense of the term I’m aware of; I think that Montmerle had a more general sense of the term in mind.

But what I think bothered Christian and I’ve realized also bothered me is the sense that the IAU has the authority to appropriate the intellectual property of any astronomer, including nonmembers. Further, it seemed that the IAU believed it could do so against the express recommendation of its own commission, on what appeared to be the whim of the General Secretary.

That sort of attitude is inconsistent with the source of the IAU’s authority, as I understand it.  That’s why I was so glad to read the response of Alain Lecavelier des Etangs, who made it clear that the IAU would seek a consensus of interested parties.  As it should be.

So why am I still neutral on the whole issue, instead of in favor of NameExoWorlds?  Because the contest seems to be outside of the IAU’s natural purview.  Asteroid names, lunar craters, and standards of time had inconsistencies across astronomy that needed unification for a global conversation to proceed efficiently.  The IAU (eventually) responsibly got the interested parties together and cleared up the confusion (as I understand things).

But with NameExoWorlds (and the Pluto thing) there isn’t any confusion in the literature*; there is no problem in need of a solution.  Worse, the people who felt most strongly about the issues were not leading the discussions.  I think that is why the IAU is getting so much attention and pushback for these efforts, in particular.

 

*There are a few planets, like those in the μ Arae system, with confusingly inconsistent designations in the refereed literature. If the IAU were simply settling those couple of disputes I’d be in favor, though it seems like small potatoes for such a big organization.

One thought on “Whence IAU authority? (and why I’m not pro-NameExoWorlds)

  1. Oona Houlihan

    “… leave out the voices of the people most affected by its decisions …” – like the people that might live on these exoplanets? ;-) … But seriously: while the IAU is an international body it is not a standards organization. Most trade associations (to make a comparison) actually accept that their behavior has to be in line with the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the respective national bodies. The way to go is for the IAU to approach the ISO and request either it to be recognized as a standard-setter or, more likely, to become a “sponsor” of the ISO’s (future) standards caucus on astronomic terms etc.

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