Panel Discussion IV

Extract

I. Hubeny Welcome to the last panel meeting. We invite general comments either from the audience or from the panelists.

V. Trimble Well, Mercedes started us with a vocabulary item and I think I would like to end with a vocabulary item. When they were first discovered, we called them ‘extra solar system planets’ which was descriptive and fine, but it's just rather cumbersome. At some point they became ‘extra solar planets.’ Now I have never seen a planet inside the Sun. And therefore ‘extrasolar’ is not a good descriptor. ‘Exoplanets’ is OK, but now that there are so many of them that perhaps they are simply ‘the planets.’ When you want to specialize to ours, you could say ‘solar system planets.’ Think how much ink it would save.