During the summer of 2022, just after the James Webb Space Telescope started sending us a steady stream of deep-space postcards, astronomer Steven Finkelstein and his team found a mysterious red splotch in one of those data deliveries. They'd spotted one of the earliest galaxies humans have ever laid eyes on — a realm that represented a distant pocket of the universe our species once couldn't dream of seeing. And, importantly, they found it on Finkelstein's daughter's birthday, a serendipity that blessed this blob with a name: Maisie's Galaxy.
But not every cosmic object has such a fairytale ending, nomenclature-wise. Someone recently tried to name one of Earth's quasi-moons "Moony McMoonface," and, ironically, the lore behind that is quite a tale.
