Weywot

[neufer]

The Planetary Society Blog
Two new names in the solar system: Herse and Weywot
By Emily Lakdawalla Nov. 12, 2009

<<Via the USGS I learned that Jupiter has passed a milestone of sorts, and now has fifty named satellites. The fiftieth is Herse, a 2000-meter-diameter rock orbiting 22 million kilometers from Jupiter that was formerly known as S/2003 J17. There remain twelve moons of Jupiter that were discovered in 2003 that don't yet have names; apparently Herse was recovered this year (meaning it was spotted in followup observations), which was the hurdle that needed to be passed before it could be officially named.

The other new name I've recently learned about is Weywot, the new name for the moon of the trans-Neptunian object Quaoar (which, at approximately 1,260 kilometers in diameter is currently the fifth or sixth largest known trans-Neptunian object, according to its Wikipedia entry anyway; it is a little bit bigger than Saturn's moon Dione). Both names are from the Tongva cultural tradition; according to the Minor Planet Center, "Weywot is the god of the sky in Tongva Mythology. Weywot was created by Quaoar when he sang the song of creation. The name was chosen by the Tongva tribe." Who are the Tongva? They are the native American tribe whose ancestral lands are now mostly paved over by the sprawling city of Los Angeles. There's an interesting story about the naming of Weywot here. Weywot, the moon of Orcus, is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 kilometers in diameter.

While researching that last one I stumbled across another item: it seems that the keeper of the names of things in the solar system has, in a turnabout, now had an object named for her. In the latest batch of Minor Planet Circulars, I find:

(10480) Jennyblue = 1982 JB2
Discovered 1982 May 15 at Palomar.

Jennifer S. Blue (b. 1954), of the U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, Arizona, has been the sine qua non of the IAU Working Group on Planetary System Nomenclature since 1995, serving both as its secretary and as the keeper of the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature.

Congratulations to her!>>

[apodman]

Weywot, the new name for the moon of the trans-Neptunian object Quaoar ...
... Weywot, the moon of Orcus ...

So which is it? I thought Weywot was the proposed moon of Quaoar while Vanth was the proposed moon of Orcus. Do I sound like some kind of RPG player or what?

[neufer]

Weywot, the new name for the moon of the trans-Neptunian object Quaoar ...
... Weywot, the moon of Orcus ...

So which is it? I thought Weywot was the proposed moon of Quaoar while Vanth was the proposed moon of Orcus. Do I sound like some kind of RPG player or what?

It's Quaoar:

Heavenly Bodies and the People of the Earth
by Nick Street

<<Naming moons can be tricky business, especially when the gods get involved.

"Naming is important,” says Mike Brown, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

He should know. Over the past six years a growing catalogue of planet-like objects at the outer edge of our solar system has kept Brown busy coming up with names for the new worlds he has discovered. Specifically, he has been researching the names of deities that figure into creation myths, to conform to the International Astronomical Union’s policy on naming objects lying beyond Neptune’s orbit.

More than a thousand trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) have been spotted by Brown and other astronomers, though only a handful have an easily predictable orbit and sufficient size to meet the prerequisites for an object’s earning something other than a numerical designation.

Sedna, a mysterious world with a dramatically elongated ten-thousand-year orbit, was named after the Inuit goddess of the deep. And prodigious Eris—whose namesake is the Greek goddess who personifies discord and strife—turned out to be larger than Pluto, a fact that sparked heated debate over the very definition of a planet.

“A name makes it real,” Brown explains. “Then it’s not just a blip in the sky; it’s a story.”

Most of the TNOs that Brown and his team have discovered are part of the Kuiper Belt—a vast ring of icy debris left over from the proto-planetary disk of matter that gave birth to the solar system. The belt extends more than a billion miles from the orbit of Neptune, the outermost planet, to a point about fifty-five times the distance between Earth and the sun. For a sense of scale, imagine that the sun is the size of a basketball. Earth’s orbit would be about one hundred feet from the ball, and the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt would be about a mile beyond that. Earth itself would be just a little bigger than the period at the end of this sentence.

Brown’s first Kuiper Belt sighting came in 2002, when he and his colleagues used the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Cal Tech’s Palomar Observatory to spot a large object beyond the orbit of Pluto—which was soon demoted to the status of “dwarf planet” as a consequence of Brown’s discoveries. (The “dwarf” modifier describes objects in a solar orbit that are massive enough to be round, but lack enough gravitational heft to clear other nearby objects from their neighborhood.)

After astronomers at other institutions were able to confirm the existence of the distant world, the discoverers settled on a strategy for coming up with a name for the object.

“We said, ‘Let’s find something local,’” Brown recalls.

***

In 1542, the Portuguese explorer Juan Cabrillo dropped anchor off the Palos Verdes Peninsula at the southern tip of what is now Los Angeles County. The Native Americans who rowed out to greet Cabrillo and his crew in redwood-plank canoes called themselves the Tongva, which in their language means “the people of the earth.”

The small tribe, which had a population of about five thousand at the time of first contact, occupied the Los Angeles Basin, the Channel Islands (including Catalina), forested land on the Pacific slope of the San Gabriel Mountains, and a few spring-fed canyons along the present-day Pacific Coast Highway. Tongva place names are still attached to a few iconic Southern California locales, including the Cahuenga Pass, Topanga Canyon, and Malibu.

Cindi Alvitre, a professor of indigenous studies at California State University in Long Beach, says that Tongva mythology and culture were intimately related to the territory the tribe inhabited.

“The land produces energy fields,” she says. “Indigenous people interacted with these fields—that’s how our ritual and language evolved. Our creation stories are tied to this landscape.”

Alvitre, who traces her Tongva roots to settlements on Catalina Island, also says that reclaiming lost spiritual practices has been especially challenging for the Tongva, whose territory now lies beneath the asphalt and concrete expanse of urban sprawl that the remnants of the tribe share with the 10 million other inhabitants of Los Angeles County.

“We don’t have anything but a genetic memory of this connection to the land,” she says.

Still, when Mike Brown began to investigate the Native American history of the area around Cal Tech, he learned there were a few people who have managed to keep Tongva stories and folkways alive.

A bit of online sleuthing led Brown to Marc Acuna, who belongs to a small band of Tongva descendents and functions in the role of wehepet, a term meaning “two-spirit” or “two-road” that was traditionally applied to people we would now identify as gay or lesbian.

“Two-spirit people are the gatekeepers between worlds,” Acuna says. “In most indigenous cultures they have a terrific spiritual duty to perform.”

Acuna’s interest in his tribal history was sparked in the mid 1990s, when Tongva remains were discovered at construction sites along Santa Monica Bay (left). His research took him to the Southwest Museum and the Pasadena Historical Society, where he unearthed wax-cylinder recordings of Tongva songs and prayers from the 1930s. As he started to learn about the connection between Tongva herbal culture and spiritual practice, a trip to an exhibit on medicinal plants at the Los Angeles County Botanical Gardens in Claremont prompted an astonishing discovery.

“There were all the plants that I’d grown up seeing in my grandmother’s garden,” Acuna says.

When Acuna heard about Brown’s interest in naming the newly spotted Kuiper Belt object after an indigenous creator-deity, the right name sprang instantly to mind.

“Quaoar [pronounced kwa-war] is the driving force of the universe,” Acuna says. “He has no shape and no form—Quaoar’s genderless, even though people usually say ‘he’ by default. And he sings and dances to bring the other high ones into being, and their singing and dancing brings everything else into existence.”

***

The generally accepted Western scientific version of the Tongva creation myth goes something like this:

Four and a half billion years ago, the atoms that compose you, your shoes, and your cell phone—and Jupiter, the sun, and everything else we currently mean when we say “the solar system”—existed as very simple molecules in a diffuse cloud of gas and dust about a light-year across in every direction.

Then the shock wave from a nearby supernova rippled through the formless cloud—itself the residue from previous stellar cataclysms—imparting energy in the form of angular momentum (or “spin”) to the molecules and sending them careening into one another.

In other words, out of emptiness and chaos, the primordial solar system had begun to dance itself into existence.

Clumps of molecules began to accrete more mass, forming seedlings called planetesimals. A deep gravity well formed where the rate of spin and accretion was greatest, and everything else was drawn into a great spiraling disk around that center of mass and energy—the proto-sun.

After 100 million years of this increasingly complex display of movement and mutual attraction, nuclear fusion ignited at the core of the newborn sun, scattering the dust and gas that had not yet been claimed by any of the larger objects in the inner solar system.

The denser material that had settled toward the bottom of the gravity well took shape as hot orbs of magma that would eventually cool to form the terrestrial planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Farther out, the gas giants and their armadas of moons began to coalesce and jockey for position. And even farther still, beyond all the heaviness and overheated drama taking place closer to the sun, the remainder of those original simple molecules—water, methane, nitrogen, and other “volatiles”—accumulated in solid form as Quaoar and the other objects in the Kuiper Belt.

“If Quaoar were as far away from us as the moon’s orbit,” Brown says, “it would appear roughly a third as large as the full moon. And instead of being white with gray patches, it would be reddish with white patches.”

Brown hastens to add that if Quaoar were as close to the sun as Earth and the moon are, it wouldn’t last long. Our atmosphere mellows the sun’s radiation, and the magnetic field generated by convection in Earth’s molten iron core deflects the particles in the solar wind. Without those protections, the temperature on the sunlit side of Earth would be approximately 250 degrees and the surface of the planet would be bombarded by ionized gas from the sun.

Subjected to that much solar energy, the icy stuff that makes up Quaoar, which has neither an atmosphere nor a magnetic field, would quickly begin to evaporate into space, where it would be swept away by the solar wind.

“It would look like a huge comet with a spectacular tail,” Brown says.

Like the tribe that gave the little world its name, Quaoar is a living relic of a largely forgotten era in our ongoing relationship to matter and the cosmos. And like Quaoar, the Tongva don’t fare well in close proximity to the source of relentless energy that dominates the modern age.

***

“When I heard they were finding bones in areas that used to be wetlands,” says Tongva chief Anthony Morales, “I knew whose bones they were finding.”

Since the mid 1990s, large construction projects have begun to encroach on the last undeveloped plots of land on the west side of Los Angeles, and the discovery of ancient human remains at those sites has been fairly commonplace. But in 2003, earthmovers at a huge multiuse project at Playa Vista—an estuary and tidal flats where developers envision thousands of housing units and millions of square feet of office space—uncovered one of the largest Native American interment sites in California.

“I started going to City Council meetings and I started lobbying for legislation to protect the remains of our ancestors,” Morales says.

Bernie Acuna, another tribal leader, says the showdown at Playa Vista was only the latest in a long series of setbacks for the Tongva, who are also referred to as Gabrielinos, in a nod toward the Spanish mission at San Gabriel where tribal refugees were quartered after their expulsion from other parts of Los Angeles County in the early 1800s.

“We lost our last reservation in 1852,” says Acuna. “We had 50,000 acres around Tejon Ranch, but the government ‘lost’ their treaty with us, so the federal agent who was supposedly out here to protect us ended up taking the last of our land for himself.”

Activism by Morales, Acuna, and Native American advocacy groups in California has produced a dramatic shift in the balance of power between indigenous groups and developers in the years since the Playa Vista controversy began. State laws passed in 2004 and 2005 require local governments to consult with tribes when they create or modify land-use plans and enjoin developers to stop work and contact local tribal leaders when they uncover burial sites.

“The legislation bringing native people into the land-use decision-making process is the first law of its kind in the country,” says Cuauhtemoc Gonzalez, tribal outreach staff assistant in California’s Office of the Governor.

Although these victories have helped to resolve the dispute at Playa Vista—the developer has agreed to re-inter ancestral remains and construct a memorial to the six thousand years of Tongva history at the site—the deeper issue of landlessness has sundered the tribe. Within the past decade, two factions have emerged within the Tongva. The “Gabrielino-Tongva”—a group that includes Bernie Acuna—has focused its efforts on gaining federal recognition and the right to acquire land for a tribal casino on the periphery of metropolitan Los Angeles. The “Gabrielino/Tongva,” led by Anthony Morales and claiming Marc Acuna (left, with Tongva youth) and Cindi Alvitre among its members, is also eager to reestablish the tribe’s relationship with its lost territory but is wary of the potential for cultural corrosion that gaming entails. Note the use of either a hyphen or a backslash in the respective identifications of the tribe. A single punctuation mark is all that distinguishes the names, but it signifies a fundamental disagreement.

“Gaming is one of the worst things that could happen to us,” says Marc Acuna—who, like Anthony Morales, is related to Bernie Acuna through family lineages that diverged two or three generations ago. “It’s monstrous. When you dangle that much money in front of people who’ve had so little for so long, suddenly it’s, ‘I’m more Indian than you are.’”

No one in either band of Tongva argues that the prospect of gaming money is free of liabilities.

“You can see how greed works in the way the tribes with casinos are treating us,” says Martha Gonzales, a member of the pro-gaming Gabrielino-Tongva tribe. Gonzales says that members of the Pechanga and Agua Caliente bands of Indians, whose casino businesses in neighboring Riverside County would most likely suffer if the Tongva won gaming rights, have worked to thwart her group’s effort to acquire land.

“It’s the big Indians keeping the little Indians down,” she says.

Still, Gonzales and other members of the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe see federal recognition and casino revenue as their last hope for surviving as a people and preserving their culture.

“We could finally get healthcare for our elders,” she says, “and educational programs for our children.”

Linda Candelaria, another councilwoman with the Gabrielino-Tongva, points to the cruel irony of her tribe’s plight. “It’s like the government’s saying, ‘We had a treaty with your people that allowed us to take your land,’” she observes, “‘but we lost the treaty and you don’t have any land, so you don’t exist.’”

***

Early last year, Mike Brown discovered a tiny moon orbiting Quaoar. The satellite is most likely composed of the same stuff that makes up its parent: large quantities of water-ice along with methane and other frozen gases surrounding a rocky core.

Brown estimates that the moon, which is too small to have enough gravity to pull itself into to sphere, is roughly sixty miles across—coincidentally, about the width of Los Angeles County.

What would we see if we could look at Quaoar and its moon from a quarter-million miles away, the distance between Earth and our moon?

“Quaoar’s moon would be too small to resolve into a disc-like shape,” says Brown. “It would probably be a bright speck like a star moving quickly around Quaoar.”

Because the International Astronomical Union’s guidelines on coming up with names for the moons of trans-Neptunian objects are a bit looser than the rule for naming TNOs themselves, Brown has decided to leave it up to the Tongva to name Quaoar’s moon.

The fractiousness of the tribe has meant that naming the moon has not been an easy process—though not because there’s any disagreement about what the moon’s name should be.

“It has to be Weywot,” says Anthony Morales. “Weywot’s the son of Quaoar like Jesus is the son of God.”

When she learned about the moon, Linda Candelaria nodded and pointed to the name Weywot—which she had highlighted in yellow marker—on pages about the myth of Quaoar and Brown’s discoveries. “That just makes sense,” she says.

“Weywot is Sky Father,” explains Marc Acuna, “the first being created by Quaoar. He’s invisible to the naked eye, but he surrounds everything.”

The trouble is that Brown made contact with the tribe through the anti-gaming Gabrielino/Tongva faction, which holds fiercely to the spiritual traditions of pre-colonial tribal culture, but whose resistance to what members perceive as exploitative or corrupting influences has produced an insularity that makes communication with outsiders very difficult.

A sympathetic reporter’s inquiries were often treated with suspicion, and though the Gabrielino/Tongva settled on Weywot as the name for Quaoar’s moon more than a year ago, as of this writing Mike Brown has yet to receive word of their decision.

By contrast, the members of the pro-gaming Gabrielino-Tongva are well organized and easily engaged, though perhaps too quick to dismiss their reticent and less numerous Gabrielino/Tongva cousins.

“The heart of the tribe is with us,” declares Bernie Acuna of the Gabrielino-Tongva.

In one sense that claim is true: The Gabrielino-Tongva number in the hundreds, whereas the Gabrielino/Tongva claim only a few dozen members. But if the pro-gaming faction is more robust, it’s also telling that the tribe’s most prominent wehepet—who traditionally acts as the conscience of the tribe—has aligned himself with Anthony Morales and other Tongva who oppose the idea of a tribal casino and the entanglements it would bring.

When the debate over whether to allow a powerful lawyer to become a developer for the tribe—with an eye toward the tribe’s potential as a source of gaming revenue—began to tilt in favor of the pro-gaming faction, Marc Acuna made his position on the matter unmistakable.

“Being wehepet, I don’t vote in tribal political matters,” he said. “But I can definitely voice an opinion. When things started to take a wrong turn, I said, ‘I’m taking my feathers and beads and going home.’”

In the meantime, Mike Brown—who continues to expand his roster of worlds at the edge of the solar system—has had plenty to keep him occupied while he awaits word from the Tongva. With any luck, he won’t have to wait much longer. An ancient moon in need of a name and a fractured tribe yearning to reclaim a portion of its homeland do not meet by accident.

Nick Street studied Christian ethics at Oberlin College and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. After a decade as a religion editor in the world of academc publishing, he completed an M.A. in print journalism. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, The Revealer, and Religion Dispatches. He is also an ordained Soto Zen priest in the lineage of Taizan Maezumi Roshi.>>