Explorer Ferdinand Magellan is not a fitting namesake for the pair of satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, a group of scientists argues.
A group of astronomers is coalescing around an idea to rename two neighbors of the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
, Magellan enslaved and killed Indigenous people encountered on the voyage, which set out from Spain in 1519 . The Magellanic clouds loom large in the field of astronomy. They’re independent galaxies, but close enough that astronomers Magellan wasn’t an astronomer. The clouds were noted by a member of his expedition, but they were already well-known to many cultures in the Southern Hemisphere, and even to previous European explorers. “It doesn’t make sense to have them named after any one person, let alone a person who never actually studied them,” says astronomer Gurtina Besla of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
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