Space Warps Collaboration

The green crosshairs pinpoint a gravitational lens lurking in an astronomical image.

Think you can find space warps? Astronomers have recruited thousands of citizen scientists to look for exoplanets, galaxies, moon craters and other cosmic curiosities — and now they need your help to go after one of the weirdest phenomena in space-time: gravitational lenses.

The Space Warps website gives Internet users the opportunity to sift through telescope images and spot galaxies so massive they bend the light rays that pass near them, like a lens. The venture could help crack some of the secrets of dark matter, the mysterious cosmic stuff that is more plentiful than the ordinary matter we see around us.

"Not only do space warps act like lenses, magnifying the distant galaxies behind them, but we can also use the light they distort to weigh them, helping us to figure out how much dark matter they contain and how it’s distributed," Oxford University physicist Phil Marshall, one of the leaders of the Space Warps research team, said in Wednesday's kickoff announcement.  "Gravitational lenses help us to answer all kinds of questions about galaxies, including how many very low-mass stars such as brown dwarfs — which aren’t bright enough to detect directly in many observations — are lurking in distant galaxies."

Space Warps is the latest gem in Zooniverse's constellation of online citizen-science ventures — a constellation that also includes Planet Hunters, Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo and much, much more. The warp-hunting effort follows the model set by those other projects: Participants are given online training exercises to sharpen their lens-spotting skills, and then they're set loose to check sky survey images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.

"Computer algorithms have already scanned the images from the CFHT survey, but there are likely to be many more space warps that the algorithms have missed. Realistic simulated space warps are dropped into some images to train the volunteers how to spot them, and reassure people that they are on the right track,’ said Anupreeta More, project co-leader from Kavli IPMU in Tokyo.

Galaxy Zoo already has demonstrated that human eyes and brains are much better than automated computer software when it comes to recognizing the subtle characteristics of astronomical phenomena. Dozens of scientific papers have been spun off from Galaxy Zoo searches — including reports on the headline-grabbing blob of green gas known as "Hanny's Voorwerp."

Space Warps could well uncover similar curiosities. Warp-hunters will be able to discuss their finds with each other and with experts on the project's online forum, and even create computer models of their discoveries. A list of gravitational lenses will be published for amateurs and professionals to investigate further.  

"Even if individual visitors only spend a few minutes glancing over 40 or so images each, that's really helpful to our research — we only need a handful of people to spot something in an image for us to say that it's worth investigating," said Oxford's Aprajita Verma, another leader of the Space Warps team.

So what are you waiting for?

More about gravitational lenses:

• Cosmic lenses find farthest galaxy yet
• Crazy cosmic lens focuses on dark matter
• Dark energy illuminated by cosmic lens

The Space Warps collaboration currently includes Phil Marshall, Aprajita Verma, Matthias Tecza, Chris Lintott, Rob Simpson (University of Oxford), Anupreeta More, Surhud More (Kavli IPMU), Amit Kapadia, Kelly Borden, David Miller, Arfon Smith (Adler Planetarium), Jean-Paul Kneib (EPFL Lausanne), Rafael Kueng, Prasenjit Saha (University of Zurich), and citizen scientists Elisabeth Baeten, Claude Cornen, Cecile Faure, Thomas Jennings, Stuart Lowe, Christine Macmillan, Julianne Wilcox and Layne Wright. Organizers say it is about to get a lot bigger.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

M. Showalter / NASA / ESA

An image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, surrounded by four smaller moons. Astronomers have proposed naming P4 and P5 after Vulcan and Cerberus.

Astronomers have decided to go with the people's choice and propose Vulcan and Cerberus (or Kerberos) as the names for Pluto's tiniest known moons, one of the discovery team's leaders said Tuesday. Vulcan bubbled up to the top of the list in a non-binding "Pluto Rocks" contest in February, thanks in part to a strong endorsement from "Star Trek" captain William Shatner. The International Astronomical Union, which traditionally approves celestial names, still has to weigh in on the discoverers' proposal.

"We did not feel rigidly bound by the vote totals, but in the end we decided that Vulcan and Cerberus/Kerberos were pretty good names," said Mark Showalter, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute who organized the contest. Showalter discussed the selection process in an email to NBC News after Nature reported that the IAU was considering the names.

Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk on the original "Star Trek" series, proposed the name Vulcan in honor of the home planet of Kirk's pointy-eared science officer, Mr. Spock. He put out the word to more than a million Twitter followers, and Vulcan ended up receiving 174,062 of the 450,324 votes cast. Cerberus was No. 2 on the list, with 99,434 votes.

Astronomers needed two names — one for the Plutonian moon P4, discovered in 2011; and another for P5, found in 2012. Although Vulcan and Cerberus were the favorites, it was not assured that the discovery team would go with those choices.

Stating the case
Traditionally, Pluto's moons are named after figures of the underworld from Greek or Roman mythology. Cerberus fit that scheme, because that was the name of the dog that guarded the gates of the Greco-Roman underworld. Vulcan, which is the name of the Roman god of fire as well as Mr. Spock's home world, posed more of a challenge.

"For the IAU proposal, I had to make the connection between Vulcan and the Greco-Roman underworld, because I knew that the nomenclature working groups would not be swayed by Star Trek mythology," Showalter explained. "We don't normally associate Vulcan with Pluto, but in fact when you go back to the literature, the Greeks and Romans understood the underworld to encompass everything beneath the surface of the earth, not just the realm of the dead. So Vulcan, the god of lava and volcanoes, really does have a natural connection to underworld.

"That being said, the nomenclature working group has to grapple with the issue that in astronomy, the name Vulcan has previously been associated with a hypothetical object or objects orbiting interior to Mercury. They also will probably have concerns about the fact that Cerberus has already been used as the name of an asteroid. I still believe that it is very important to give the working group latitude in this decision. I remain optimistic that a consensus will emerge."

One possibility would be to use Kerberos as an alternate spelling for Cerberus, to avoid any potential confusion. That's how the discoverers of another moon of Pluto, Nix, got around the fact that there was already an asteroid named after Nyx, the Greek goddess of the night.

Nicknaming an exoplanet
Meanwhile, another celestial naming contest has come to a surprise ending. For weeks, a commercial venture called Uwingu has been running a contest to come up with an unofficial nickname for Alpha Centauri Bb, the closest exoplanet. Thanks to a last-minute surge of vote-buying, the winner of the planet-naming game is "Albertus Alauda."

"I chose this name to honor my grandfather," Jason Lark wrote in his online citation for the name. He explained that Albertus Alauda is the Latin translation of Albert Lark, his grandfather's name.

Uwingu charges $4.99 for each planet nomination, and 99 cents for each vote. A spokeswoman for Uwingu, Ellen Butler, told NBC News in an email Tuesday that Lark "came in with a $742.50 payment last night to take the win." The mass voting is perfectly in accordance with the rules of Uwingu's game.

"I am overjoyed that my nomination won," Lark told NBC News in an email. "I think my grandfather would be very happy, and I hope my citation does him justice. I am very proud of my granddad. As with any other star or planet, they along with their names live on much longer than any one man, and most have a story behind them, such as in the days of old when stars were used to navigate the globe. I would like to think that Albertus Alauda will take its place alongside them in the generations to come, along with the story behind it."

Uwingu was created last year to offer space-based entertainment, to generate revenue and raise money for space science and education projects. The aim is to distribute at least half of the proceeds in the form of grants to programs such as the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array, Astronomers Without Borders and the Galileo Teacher Training Program. The contest to nickname Alpha Centauri Bb, which was discovered last year just 4.3 light-years from Earth, brought in about $10,000.

Among the runner-up names were Sagan and Einstein, Ron Paul and Heinlein, Rakhat (the Alpha Centauri planet featured in a sci-fi novel called "The Sparrow"), Tiber (the Alpha Centauri planet that moonwalker Buzz Aldrin made famous in his novel "Encounter With Tiber") and Amara (the first name of the nominator's fiancee). In all, more than 1,200 names were nominated.

Neither Albertus Alauda nor any of those other names has official status with the IAU. In a stinging news release, the IAU said Uwingu's campaigns "will not lead to an officially recognized exoplanet name, despite the price paid or the number of votes accrued."

There is currently no IAU-sanctioned process for approving popular names for the hundreds of extrasolar planets detected beyond our solar system. Instead, astronomers take the name of the star (for example, Alpha Centauri B or Kepler-62) and tack on a letter of the alphabet, starting with "b." (Hence, Alpha Centauri Bb or Kepler-62f.) For the time being, the IAU is sticking with that system, although it said members would discuss establishing a friendlier naming scheme this year.

Meanwhile, Uwingu's "baby book of names" for exoplanets remains open for business. "Also, next week we'll debut a new way to engage in exoplanet naming," Uwingu's CEO, planetary scientist Alan Stern, said in an email.

More about exoplanet names:

• Who gets to name alien planets?
• Newfound planets need better names
• Why Pluto can't have a Mickey moon

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

L. Calcada / N. Risinger / ESO

An artist's conception shows the planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a member of the triple-star system that's closest to Earth. Alpha Centauri B is the most brilliant object in the sky, with Alpha Centauri A at lower left and our own sun visible as a bright speck at upper right.

The closest known exoplanet is currently called Alpha Centauri Bb, but the folks behind Uwingu want you to come up with a cooler name.

"It might be Pandora. Who knows?" said planetary scientist Alan Stern, Uwingu's co-founder and chief executive officer.

As fans of the James Cameron sci-fi blockbuster "Avatar" know, Pandora is the name of the moon in the Alpha Centauri system where the movie's action takes place. In science fiction, planets beyond our solar system have colorful names. But in reality, exoplanets merely have designations that are based either on the name of the star they orbit (like Alpha Centauri Bb) or on the name of the probe that discovered the world (like Kepler-37b)

The International Astronomical Union, which usually takes the lead role in naming celestial objects and features, has held back on creating an exoplanet-naming process. So Stern and his partners set up Uwingu to fill the vacuum — and raise some funds for research and education in the process.

Starting today, Uwingu is taking nominations for Alpha Centauri Bb's new name, at a price of $4.99 per suggestion. For 99 cents per vote, Uwingu's registered users can pick their favorite name. The name that has the most votes when the contest ends on April 15 will be crowned the people's choice. It won't carry any weight with the IAU, but Stern is hoping that the name will stick.

"There are people in the world who think astronomers own the sky, and what we're effectively saying is, it's the people who own the sky," Stern said.

The user who suggests the winning name will receive recognition and prizes from Uwingu. There'll be additional yet-to-be-specified prizes for runner-ups, and for those whose name suggestions reach the 100-, 1,000- and 10,000-vote level. Uwingu already has a list to start with, since it's been in the exoplanet-naming business for several months.

"Older names will be grandfathered in, but I think the new ones will soar past these," Stern told NBC News. (The current top vote-getter is Heinlein, a name that pays tribute to the science-fiction master Robert Heinlein.)

Proceeds from the contest will be distributed according to Uwingu's formula, which puts half of the money into a fund to be given out as grants. Uwingu is structured as a commercial venture, so the rest of the money helps pay the venture's bills. Stern realizes that having people pay to suggest planetary names with no official standing may be controversial, and he's willing to take the heat.

"Just spell our name right," he said.

His supporters include one of the world's foremost planet-hunters, Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy, who is one of Uwingu's advisers. In an email, Marcy told NBC News he thought the idea of naming Alpha Centauri Bb sounded "marvelous."

"It should be fun and creative," Marcy said. "It hurts no one, and generates funding for research. What a perfect antidote to the modern crunch on funding in pure research!"

Uwingu's critics include Caltech astronomer Wladimir Lyra, who came up with his own proposal for naming extrasolar planets a few years ago. He's not crazy about the pay-for-play naming system. "What I would advocate is a classical way of naming the planets from our own myths, the way we name features on planets in our own solar system," Lyra told NBC News. "We can draw upon the expertise that the IAU has for naming things."

As long as people understand what they're buying — and what's not for sale — Uwingu's contest looks like an interesting and harmless experiment. Heck, it might even push the world's astronomers to reach consensus on names for the most prominent exoplanets. But what do you think? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 9:35 p.m. ET: I originally wrote that Uwingu is structured as a for-profit venture, and that the company's partners will receive some of the proceeds — but in a follow-up exchange, Stern said that Uwingu is a long way from making a profit. Half of the revenue goes to a fund for research and education grants, and the other half helps pay the bills.

"Uwingu was to find a new way to fund space research and education in tough times. Some of us wrote checks and put some pretty serious money into getting the company started, and each of the members of this company has contributed hundreds and in some cases thousands of hours to developing this since 2010," Stern said in an email. "None of us has received even a dime from the Indiegogo campaign or any funds we've earned on sales since we debuted. This is a labor of love."

More about exoplanets and their names:

• Mission to Alpha Centauri by 2011?
• How to take a trip to Alpha Centauri
• Newfound planets need better names

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

What better way to celebrate the glories of space exploration than to make a video about it? How about making a video about space exploration, and winning a trip for four to one of NASA's space centers? That's the top prize in the "Why Space Matters to the Future" video contest, sponsored by the centers in cooperation with the Coalition for Space Exploration.

Contest organizers are looking for videos up to two minutes in length that explain the values and benefits of space exploration, for this generation and future generations. The deadline for entries is April 7. The viewing public will get a chance to vote for their favorite, and a panel of judges will keep the people's choice in mind when they select the winner on April 17 — just after the global spaceflight celebration known as Yuri's Night.

The winning video will earn its maker a VIP trip for four to one of NASA's visitor centers: the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, Space Center Houston in Texas, or the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama. Check the coalition's website or VisitNASA.com to check out the contest instructions, review the official rules and upload your video.

Another space-themed video contest is coming up on a deadline this week: The Golden Spike Company is asking its Indiegogo supporters to send in videos touting the potential benefits of lunar exploration. Golden Spike plans to offer expeditions to the moon with a price tag of $1.4 billion or so for two-person round trips. Its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign is aimed at raising $240,000 for public outreach and engagement efforts — and the video contest is meant as a perk for the venture's contributors.

Video entries for the first round can be submitted via email to Angelica@tntcommgroup.com through Friday. Selected videos will be posted to Golden Spike's YouTube channel and put up for a public vote. Winning entries will be eligible for prizes such as lunar-lander models. TNT Creative Group's Tina Lange explains how it all works in the video below:

More about space ventures:

• Meet the folks planning trips to the moon and Mars
• The moon looms again as future destination
• Five rationales for the next Space Age

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Copyright 2013 John Sarkissian

John Sarkissian, operations scientist at the Parkes Radio Observatory in Australia, captured this view of Comet PanSTARRS hanging in the sky over the Parkes Radio Telescope on March 5. The telescope was made famous in a movie from 2000 titled "The Dish." Sarkissian told SpaceWeather.com that the comet picture is a "5-second exposure taken through my Canon 400D digital camera set on ISO 1600."

You'll be hearing a lot about Comet PanSTARRS, also known as C/2011 L4, now that it's become visible in the Northern Hemisphere — but if you're not properly prepared, the experience can be underwhelming. You have to know where and when to look, and with what. Fortunately, there are lots of resources to draw upon.

First, some quick facts: Comet PanSTARRS is thought to come from the Oort Cloud on the solar system's edge, and is making its first round through the inner solar system. It was discovered in 2011 by the Pan-STARRS Telescope team, but it didn't attract wide attention until last year, when astronomers noticed a brightening trend that promised to produce a sight visible to the naked eye. The comet is expected to shine brighter than the stars of the Big Dipper (magnitude +2 to +1) over the weekend.

The challenge is that during this time of peak brightness, the comet will be visible quite low near the western horizon, just after sunset.

"Look too early and the sky will be too bright," NASA postdoctoral fellow Rachel Stevenson said in a PanSTARRS preview provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Look too late, the comet will be too low and obstructed by the horizon. This comet has a relatively small window."

The farther north you are, the closer to the horizon you'll have to look. Those aren't exactly ideal conditions, especially if you have an obstructed view to the west, or if there are clouds on the horizon, or if there's significant haze in the air. The best viewing spots should be at higher elevations, far from haze and the glare of city lights, where the skies can get as dark as possible as soon as possible after sunset.

Depending on your location in the Northern Hemisphere, you may not be able to get a good look at the comet until next week. But even if you miss seeing it on Thursday or Friday, it's worth checking out a variety of spots over the next few days to get ready for the peak experience on March 12 and 13. That's when Comet PanSTARRS is due to make a pretty appearance close to the crescent moon.

Although the comet has become visible to the naked eye, you'll want to pull out the binoculars to make out the comet's tail. You might notice two elements to the tail, pointing in slightly different directions: One element is made up of glowing ionized gas, while the other is made up of dust that reflects the light of the sun.

PanSTARRS is due to make its closest approach to the sun on Sunday, coming within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers). On each evening after that, the comet's position will be slightly more elevated from the horizon, and shift slightly to the north. It'll also become dimmer. By mid-April, the comet will no longer be visible to the naked eye, even under the best circumstances.

Rufus Canty

Rufus Canty posted this picture of Comet PanSTARRS to the Cosmic Log Facebook page on Tuesday. "From Puerto Rico, looks awesome," Canty wrote.

NASA

This chart shows the position of Comet PanSTARRS on several nights in March, as well as the position of the crescent moon on March 12, which is arguably the best day for comet-watching.

When PanSTARRS fades from the spotlight, don't put your binoculars back in the attic: Another starry messenger from the outer solar system, known as Comet ISON, is due to make its appearance in November. Some skywatchers have dubbed ISON the "Comet of the Century" because the most optimistic projections suggest it could shine as brightly as the full moon. It's way too early to make firm predictions, but it's a good bet that the comet-watching skills you develop while looking for PanSTARRS will come in handy when it's ISON's turn.

Got comet pictures? Share them via NBC News' FirstPerson photo upload site and we'll pass them along in a future posting.

Now for those resources:

• PanSTARRS updates from Sky & Telescope
• Astronomy Magazine's PanSTARRS guide
• All you need to know from EarthSky
• Video: When can you see the comet?
• Space.com's PanSTARRS viewing guide
• Discovery News' comet viewing guide
• Check with your local astronomy club
• Comet gallery at SpaceWeather.com
• Guide to photographing comets
• More tips from EyesOnCometISON.com
• Comet reports from "Waiting for ISON"
• Geek out at Comets-ML and CometObs
• Flash interactive: Inside a comet
• More about comets from Cosmic Log

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Vulcan and Cerberus (or Kerberos) emerged as the people's choices for naming Pluto's tiniest moons in the SETI Institute's "Pluto Rocks" contest, which ended on Monday. But in the course of running the contest, the organizers fielded 30,000 write-in suggestions — and you may well see some of those suggestions surface in the future.

"I've been delighted by the response," said Mark Showalter, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute who played a leading role in the discovery of Pluto's fourth and fifth moons. Showalter was the point person for the moon-naming contest, which drew more than 450,000 online votes over the past two weeks.

More than 20 names were on the ballot, including Vulcan (the Roman god of fire) and Cerberus (the watchdog of the underworld). Vulcan was added to the list after the contest started, at the urging of "Star Trek" actor William Shatner, and grabbed the lion's share of the votes. But there were scads of other suggestions that weren't used, mostly because they weren't in line with the International Astronomical Union's tradition that the moons of Pluto should be named after figures from Greek or Roman mythology with some sort of connection to the underworld. Pluto was himself the mythological god of the underworld.

It's the IAU that has the final say over the names for the moons, which were discovered over the past couple of years and are now known merely as P4 and P5. Now that the crowdsourcing contest is over, Showalter willl be meeting with his colleagues on the discovery team and discussing whether to go with Vulcan and Cerberus or some other names. The names selected by the discoverers will then be considered by IAU committee members for adoption or reconsideration.

"It could take one to two months for the final names of P4 and P5 to be selected and approved," Showalter said on the "Pluto Rocks" website. "Stay tuned."

M. Buie / SwRI / NASA / ESA

These two pictures of Pluto represent the Hubble Space Telescope's most detailed view of the dwarf planet, but pictures from NASA's New Horizons probe should provide better resolution.

During a Google+ Hangout, Showalter mentioned the two most frequently suggested names that were left off the ballot. No surprise there: Considering that Pluto is a Disney cartoon character as well as a dwarf planet, you'd expect that Mickey and Minnie (as in Walt Disney's talking mice) would be the favorites.

"Yes, I am a big fan of Disney myself, but no, they are not compliant names," Showalter said. Although Mickey and Minnie make a cuter couple than Orpheus and Eurydice, they're not Greek or Roman mythological characters connected with the underworld.

Some of the other names, however, may come up again. When NASA's New Horizons probe sails past Pluto in 2015, still more mini-moons might be spotted. P6, P7 and so on would provide additional opportunities for the "compliant names" on Showalter's newly expanded list. And that's not all: New Horizons' camera could to snap pictures of previously unseen features on Pluto and its moons, That opens up a new frontier for names.

The names of planetary features don't have to follow the rules about Greek or Roman mythology: On Mercury, for example, craters are named after famous writers and artists. The hydrocarbon lakes detected on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, are named after the earthly lakes they resemble. Titan's mountains are named after the fictional mountains from "The Lord of the Rings" and other works by J.R.R. Tolkien, while the Saturnian moon's dark plains are named after planets from the "Dune" science-fiction series.

For Pluto and its moons, "we have all kinds of options," Showalter said. He noted that the naming suggestions followed some potentially appealing trends — specifically, Norse mythological figures as well as characters and locations from the "Star Wars" movie series and H.P. Lovecraft's fantasy and horror tales. Might we hear about Mount Loki, the Hoth ice sheet or Cthulhu Crater in the years to come? Will some scientist pick up on the Vulcan connection and start naming the hills of a Plutonian moon after Worf, Quark, Chakotay and T'Pol? To paraphrase another character from the "Star Trek" saga: "Make it so!"

More about planetary names:

• Uwingo aims to create Baby Planet Name Book
• How about better names for alien planets?
• Solar system's not changing — just the lingo

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

M. Showalter / NASA / ESA

An image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, surrounded by four smaller moons. P4 and P5 will be getting new names. One of them might be called Vulcan.

The organizer of a contest to name Pluto's two tiniest moons can't guarantee that either one of them will be called "Vulcan" — but now that the name nominated by the original captain on the "Star Trek" TV show has won first place in the voting, planetary scientist Mark Showalter promises to argue the best case he can.

"My starting position is that we should work with the names that received the most votes," Showalter told NBC News on Friday.

The "Pluto Rocks" voting concluded at noon ET Monday, and is being followed by a 1:30 p.m. Google+ Hangout sponsored by the SETI Institute, the place where Showalter works. Vulcan came out on top with 174,062 of the 450,324 votes cast. But don't expect Showalter to declare immediately that Vulcan is the choice for one of Pluto's moons.

"There will not be an announcement on Monday," he said.

For one thing, it's not totally up to Showalter to make the nomination. He's just one of the leading scientists on the discovery teams for P4 and P5, the two moons that were found in 2011 and 2012. All the members from each of the teams will have to agree on the names to be submitted to the International Astronomical Union for approval. Even then, the IAU could voice concerns about the names they submit, leading to alternate suggestions. Showalter said he's actually seen that happen in the case of the Uranian moon that ended up being called Cupid.

Kirk ... takes ... command
Vulcan wasn't on Showalter's initial list of prospects, but he added it to the ballot at the urging of William Shatner, the actor who played Captain James T. Kirk on the original "Star Trek" series in the late 1960s. Shatner favored the name because it was the fictional home planet of Kirk's pointy-eared science officer, Mr. Spock. "Let's hope the IAU thinks Vulcan is a good name," Shatner wrote in a tweet to his 1.35 million Twitter followers.

Showalter said Shatner's endorsement definitely skewed the results. "Early on, it's pretty clear there were some Trek fans who seem to have resorted to augmented voting technologies," Showalter said. But he's convinced that the groundswell of support for Vulcan is genuine, and he said he's "come up with a pretty good case" for using the name.

"I want people to feel that their vote counted," Showalter said.

The IAU's guidelines for Pluto's moons stipulate that they should be named after Greek or Roman gods who have some connection to the mythological underworld. Those guidelines worked for Pluto's three other moons, Charon (ferryman of the dead), Nix (goddess of darkness) and Hydra (a many-headed monster).

Vulcan has a family relationship to the underworld, in that he was Pluto's nephew. And in his capacity as the god of fire, Vulcan tended to hang out in the depths beneath Mount Etna and other volcanoes, rather than on the heights of Mount Olympus. That may not be Hell, exactly, but it's certainly the underworld.

Showalter admitted that it might be tricky to have the god of fire associated with one of the coldest places in the solar system. "It may well be there's a consensus that it's a great name, but not a great name for a moon of Pluto," he said. Also, the name Vulcan has been associated with a hypothetical planet that was thought to circle the sun within Mercury's orbit. The 19th-century French astronomer who discovered Neptune, Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier, spent fruitless years looking for it. Pluto's moon is in an entirely different place, but Showalter sees that as a potential plus.

"Maybe we'd be doing Le Verrier a favor by saying that when he was looking for the ninth planet inside Mercury's orbit, he was looking in the wrong direction," Showalter joked.

Some have said the name Vulcan should be reserved for a planet beyond our own solar system. In response, Showalter points out that there's no IAU procedure for giving names to extrasolar planets (beyond generic designations such as Kepler-37b or Gliese 163c). That situation may change if planet-naming ventures such as Uwingu take hold. But in the meantime, Showalter feels that Vulcan should at least be given a fair shot at solar system fame.

Another moon to name
So it's a sure thing that Showalter will try making the case for Vulcan. But what about the other Plutonian moon?

Cerberus held onto the No. 2 spot in the voting, with 99,432 votes, and so Showalter will argue the case for Cerberus as well. That name fits perfectly with the mythological underworld theme, because Cerberus was the three-headed hound that guarded the gates of the underworld.

One drawback is that there's already an asteroid named Cerberus, and the IAU doesn't want newly named celestial bodies to be confused with previously named objects. Showalter said there are at least two ways around that issue: One is to argue that the asteroid and the moon wouldn't be confused. The precedent for this is Io, a mythological name that refers to a Jovian moon as well as an asteroid. Another way out is to change the spelling slightly — say, to the Greek name Kerberos. One precedent for this is the Plutonian moon Nix, which uses an alternate spelling to avoid confusion with the asteroid Nyx. (By the way, there's already an asteroid named Vulcano, but that name is considered different enough from Vulcan,)

Opening the moon-naming process up to a vote has been a lot of work, even if it's a non-binding vote, and Showalter said he doubts that he'll do it again. But he's gratified by the response: The contest attracted hundreds of thousands of votes from scores of countries around the world, generated more than 30,000 write-in suggestions for names, and gave Pluto fans and "Star Trek" fans lots to think about.

What would Spock think about all this? Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played the alien on the original "Star Trek" show, said via Twitter that "'Vulcan' is the logical choice." I can imagine Spock saying that, but I can also imagine him uttering just one word. ...

More about Pluto and its moons:

• Pluto's moons offer clues to alien worlds
• Pluto's atmosphere larger than previously thought
• All about Pluto from NBCNews.com
• Cosmic Log archive on Pluto

This report was originally published Friday and was updated with the results of the "Pluto Rocks" contest on Monday.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Fri Feb 22, 2013 7:35 PM EST

NASA

NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn (left), Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield (center) and space station commander Kevin Ford strike a zero-G pose in the International Space Station's Harmony node. All three will participate in Friday's Google+ Hangout.

Friday's live Google+ Hangout represents one small step for NASA, one giant leap for the Web-based videoconferencing tool.

Space-to-Earth hookups are nothing new for the International Space Station: NASA TV regularly broadcasts video from the orbital outpost as it circles the globe at an altitude of 240 miles (385 kilometers). Astronauts have been sending Twitter updates and Flickr photos from space for years. Heck, even NASA's robots have Facebook pages. But Friday's hourlong event, scheduled to run from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. ET, marks the first time that NASA has done a Hangout.

"We're looking forward to it," said Jason Townsend, a spokesman at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

He said NASA has selected 20 video questions from the scads that were sent in by the agency's social-media followers, and at least some of those questions will be aired for the space station astronauts to answer during a 20-minute downlink opportunity starting at 11 a.m. ET. "We're angling to fill every minute," Townsend told NBC News.

Three of the space station's six astronauts — station commander Kevin Ford, NASA colleague Tom Marshburn and Canada's Chris Hadfield — will participate in the space-plus-Earth Hangout. (The three others, all Russians, will presumably be minding the store.)

Townsend said that for the balance of the hour, questions will be handled by two NASA astronauts on the ground: Ron Garan, a social-media star who's in nearly 3 million Google+ circles; and Nicole Stott, who participated in the space station's first live NASA Tweetup in 2009.

Questions can be submitted during the Hangout via Google+, via Twitter (by including the hashtag #askAstro) and via NASA's Facebook page.

The outer-space Hangout is just the latest leap for NASA's social-media strategy: The Tweetups of the late space shuttle era have given way to a string of NASA Social gatherings. One took place just this week at NASA Headquarters. NASA regularly sets aside seats for social-media mavens at big events, including next month's SpaceX Dragon launch.

Last year, NASA's social-media teams presented 16 events that brought more than 1,000 followers to NASA facilities and other spacey locales. Mars Curiosity rover has been the star of the show, thanks in part to her (yes, her) 1.3 million Twitter followers. During the rover's landing last August, NASA served up a record 36 million webcast streams, and the six-wheeled robot has been known to check in to Foursquare from Mars.

How can the Three Amigos on the space station possibly compete with Curiosity (and her cantankerous, non-NASA-sponsored alter ego, Sarcastic Rover)? Tune in on Friday and find out.

More marvels from the space station:

• Astronaut's artistry hits warp speed
• Space-plus-Earth duet makes debut
• Online contest to boost space station power

After NASA's Hangout, keep an eye out for the Weekly Space Hangout, which brings space scribes together for an hour starting at 3 p.m. ET. Universe Today's Fraser Cain and Astrosphere's Scott Lewis (the Bald Astronomer) are among the ringleaders.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Paramount TV via AP file

The original "Star Trek" TV cast included Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, the Starship Enterprise's pointy-eared science officer, and William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk.

Just one day after astronomers asked Internet users to pick from a list of 12 names for Pluto's tiniest moons, they added a 13th name — Vulcan — at the urging of Star Trek icon William Shatner.

"Vulcan is the Roman god of lava and smoke, and the nephew of Pluto. (Any connection to the Star Trek TV series is purely coincidental, although we can be sure that Gene Roddenberry read the classics.) Thanks to William Shatner for the suggestion!" discovery team leader Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute wrote Tuesday in an update to the "Pluto Rocks" blog.

You don't have to be a hard-core Trek fan to know that Vulcan was the fictional home planet of Mr. Spock, the pointy-eared science officer on the original TV series' Starship Enterprise. Roddenberry was the series' creator. And long before he became a Priceline pitchman, Shatner played the Enterprise's skipper, Captain James T. Kirk.

The point of the "Pluto Rocks" balloting, which runs through Feb. 25, is to weigh public sentiment for the naming of Pluto's two most recently discovered moons, now known as P4 and P5. As the moons' discoverers, Showalter and his colleagues have the right to recommend formal names for adoption by the International Astronomical Union. They thought it would be fun to give the general public a non-binding advisory role.

The contest caught Shatner's eye, and he made a couple of suggestions in a Twitter update: "So what do you think of the idea of naming the two moons of Pluto Vulcan and Romulus? You have mythology, pos[itive] and neg[ative]."

Any voter can suggest write-in names, as Shatner did, but the names should refer to people, places or things in Greek or Roman mythology that have a connection to the underworld. Right now, the two favored names are Styx (which refers to a major river of the underworld as well as the rock band) and Cerberus or Kerberos (which refers to the underworld's guard dog as well as the modern-day network protocol).

More than 120,000 votes have been cast already, with less than 5,000 of them going to Vulcan — so Shatner would have to get those Vulcan votes multiplying like Tribbles to catch up to Styx and Cerberus. But that's not impossible, especially if he puts the word out to his 1.3 million Twitter followers.

As for Shatner's other suggestion, Romulus certainly has a connection to Roman mythology and Trek lore. In mythology, Romulus was one of the founders of Rome, while in the Star Trek universe, the name refers to the homeworld of a race that rivaled the Vulcans. However, one of the IAU's guidelines is that a proposed name should not be confused with pre-existing names for other celestial bodies. That poses "a bit of a problem," Showalter said.

"Romulus, along with his brother Remus, are the names of the moons of the asteroid 87 Silvia," he wrote. "They were discovered by a team led by my good colleague Franck Marchis, now a senior scientist at the SETI Institute."

Sorry, Captain. Because there's already a Romulus in this sector of the galaxy, scientists can't reuse the name. They just cannae do it.

Can you think of other mythological names with science-fiction connections? If they're not already taken, share your ideas in the comment section below — and send them along to the "Pluto Rocks" folks as well.

Update for 8:45 p.m. ET Feb. 14: Vulcan is now the top pick in the "Pluto Rocks" poll, with more than 60,000 votes out of the 234,720 responses registered. Styx and Cerberus are second and third on the list. Showalter has added eight more names to the ballot, bringing the total list to 21. The eight additions are Elysium, Hecate, Melinoe, Orthrus, Sisyphus, Tantalus, Tartarus and Thanatos. "Pluto needs more moons!" Showalter writes in a Cosmic Diary entry.

More about Pluto and its moons:

• Pluto's moons offer clues to alien worlds
• Pluto's atmosphere larger than previously thought
• All about Pluto from NBCNews.com
• Cosmic Log archive on Pluto

Check out Monday's Google+ Hangout about Pluto and the moon-naming project on the SETI Institute's website.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Tue Feb 12, 2013 11:30 PM EST

NASA / ESA / STScI

Internet users can vote on what to name Pluto's most recently found moons, P4 and P5.

The discoverers of Pluto's fourth and fifth moons are letting Internet users have a say in what they should be named, by throwing the question open for a non-binding advisory vote.

The "Pluto Rocks" project, organized by the SETI Institute, is part of a trend pointing toward getting the public involved in the outer-space naming process. NASA, for example, has solicited name suggestions for the asteroid due to be visited by the OSIRIS-REx probe, and for one of the modules on the International Space Station (more on that later).

This time, the objects to be named are two tiny satellites of Pluto that were found during a detailed analysis of data from the Hubble Space Telescope: P4, which was discovered in 2011; and P5, detected just last year. The moons are only 15 to 20 miles (20 to 30 kilometers) across, at the limit of Hubble's observing power. The astronomers behind the discoveries were checking out Pluto's surroundings just to make sure the way was clear for NASA's New Horizons probe to fly past the dwarf planet in 2015.

Convention dictates that the discoverers of celestial bodies get to suggest names for adoption by the International Astronomical Union. When P4 and P5 were revealed, "I received literally hundreds of suggestions," said one of the leaders of the discovery teams, Mark Showalter, an astronomer at the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.

Showalter has been involved in the naming of moons before (Saturn's Pan, as well as Uranus' Mab and Cupid), but that was nothing compared with the clamor over P4 and P5. "It seems that the public has a much greater interest in Pluto," he said.

He said it was Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the $700 million New Horizons mission, who suggested putting the name question up for a public vote. "I just jumped on it when he suggested it," Showalter said.

The ballot on the Pluto Rocks website offers 12 potential names for perusal, all of which follow the precedent that Pluto and its moons are named after Greek or Roman mythological figures with a connection to the underworld. Pluto, for example, was master of the underworld. Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is named after the boatsman that ferried the souls of the dead across the River Styx. The moons Nix and Hydra, discovered in 2005, were named after the goddess of the night and a many-headed monster that guarded one of the entrances to the underworld.

The 12 suggested names for P4 and P5 are Acheron, Alecto, Cerberus, Erebus, Eurydice, Heracles, Hypnos, Lethe, Obol, Orpheus, Persephone and Styx. Some of these names have already been used for asteroids, and in those cases, the teams might go for variant spellings just to avoid any confusion (for example, Orfeus instead of Orpheus, or Kerberos instead of Cerberus). Write-in votes are also allowed, and some of those write-ins might end up being added to the official ballot.

The voting deadline is Feb. 25. After the vote, the discovery teams will choose two names to submit to the IAU, and announce which names won out after their formal approval — most likely by April or so. "We're not going to guarantee that they'll be the top two names [in the voting], but they'll probably be high on the list," Showalter said. "We're not going to all this trouble just to pick names that we chose already."

Showalter and his colleagues want to retain some control just to make sure that they don't get railroaded by a media-driven ballot-stuffing campaign, such as the one that marked NASA's "name-the-module" contest in 2009. Back then, talk-show comedian Stephen Colbert drummed up more than 200,000 write-in votes to get a space station module named after himself. The space agency ended up calling the module Tranquility instead, but named the treadmill inside the module "C.O.L.B.E.R.T." as a consolation prize.

There could be similar shenanigans this time around, especially in light of Pluto's pop-culture popularity. "I suspect Minnie and Mickey will be high on the list of write-ins," Showalter joked.

The moon-naming contest could reignite the years-long controversy over the IAU's classification of Pluto as a "dwarf planet" rather than an honest-to-goodness planet — but Showalter said the labels don't matter all that much to him. "It's a very small planet, and it seems to me appropriate, based on its size, to call it a dwarf planet," he said. "I don't see that as a demotion."

Could Pluto have even more moons? That's the big reason why the discovery teams took so long to address the naming of P4 and P5. "Frankly, we wanted to wait until we scoured the data," just in case there was a sixth moon to add to the list, Stern said. But after months of scrutinizing the Hubble data, the astronomers concluded that the next discoveries would have to come from the New Horizons probe.

"Come 2015, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we have a P6, P7 and P8 to deal with," Showalter said.

More about Pluto and its moons:

• Pluto's moons offer clues to alien worlds
• Pluto's atmosphere larger than previously thought
• All about Pluto from NBCNews.com
• Cosmic Log archive on Pluto

A Google+ Hangout is scheduled on Feb. 11 at 2 p.m. ET (11 a.m. PT) with Showalter and another scientist involved in the Pluto moon discoveries, Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Questions from viewers will be taken during the event using Twitter (hashtag #PlutoRocks), the SETI Institute Facebook page and the Google Hangout.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Published at 9 a.m. ET Feb. 11, 2013.

This false-color view of Toro Crater on Mars was captured on Dec. 1, 2011, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and released on Wednesday. The different colors reflect different mineral composition on the Martian surface.

There's not much red in this picture of the Red Planet, produced by the high-resolution camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Browns and blues and greens and yellows and violets ... but red? Not so much. There's a method in this colorful madness: The riot of color tells scientists that, mineralogically speaking, this is a wildly diverse region of Mars.

The orbiter took this picture of Toro Crater in Mars' northern hemisphere back on Dec. 1, and the processed version was released just this week. The University of Arizona's Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment or HiRISE, says the different colors point to different kinds of minerals that may have been altered through the action of liquid water and heat on ancient Mars.

HiRISE's views in different wavelengths can be tweaked to tell geologists things about surface composition that you might not notice in a "true color" photograph.

"In general, the blue and green colors indicate unaltered minerals like pyroxene and olivine, whereas the warmer colors indicate alteration into clays and other minerals," McEwen writes in his image advisory. "The linear north-south trending features are windblown dunes that are much younger than the bedrock."

Such hydrothermal alteration could get a closer examination elsewhere on Mars when NASA's Curiosity rover touches down in Gale Crater this August.

For more of this crazy imagery, check out this longer, higher-resolution view of the Toro Crater scene. If you've got red-blue glasses, you'll get a kick out of this 3-D version. The HiRISE home page will point you to thousands of pictures from Mars — some in true color, some in false color, some in black and white, and some in 3-D red and blue. Feel free to go crazy.

S. Robbins / Moon Mappers / CosmoQuest / NASA

This image of the moon shows craters that have been identified by citizen scientists as part of the Moon Mappers project. The blue circles indicate raw IDs by individual users, while the red circles indicate craters identified by a computer program that groups together individual markings.

Where in the Cosmos?
On the Cosmic Log Facebook page, we've been featuring a series called "Where in the Cosmos" — in which we put up a curious space picture for people to puzzle over. Last week, I posted a picture of some cratered terrain with red and blue circles all over it. It took less than 24 hours for Robert Dryden to figure out that the picture showed some of the first results from a citizen-science project called Moon Mappers.

Scientists have long studied craters on the moon to trace the evolution of the solar system. The distribution and estimated ages of lunar craters have led astronomers to conclude, for example, that the inner solar system weathered a hailstorm of impacts known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment" about 4 billion years ago.

Crater counting is a valuable exercise, but it's hard to automate. Moon Mappers, a project presented by the CosmoQuest website, is calling upon the wisdom of crowds to help scientists make sense out of the imagery being sent back to Earth by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Similar citizen-science projects, organized by Zooniverse, have yielded published research — and Moon Mappers is likely to be similarly productive. So if you want to take part in some real science, consider joining the Moon Mappers team.

The moon picture was doubly apt, because of the Moon Mappers angle as well as the past week's political debates over future moon missions. For the latest word in that debate, check out this commentary by NBC News' longtime Cape Canaveral correspondent, Jay Barbree.

I posted this week's "Where in the Cosmos" picture puzzle earlier today, and within an hour several Cosmic Log Facebookers figured out that it was a 3-D view of the Snowman crater chain on the asteroid Vesta, as seen by NASA's Dawn probe. This means that Jarin Udom, Joan Tweedell and Ryan Anthony Sebastian Carroll join Robert Dryden in the winner's circle. They're all eligible to receive 3-D glasses once I get their mailing addresses.

To get in on the next "Where in the Cosmos" puzzle, be sure to hit the "Like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page ... and if you're already a fan, thanks for being part of the community!

More fun with space pictures:

• Jan. 27: 3-D color map of the universe
• Jan. 20: Stephen Hawking's curios explained

Slideshow: Get an eyeful from outer space

ESO / VISTA / J. Emerson / EPA

Gaze into the Helix Nebula's golden eye and see the other cosmic highlights of January 2012.

Launch slideshow

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.