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    Question ID:   5961         Current Version: 1
Question: How did Mercury/Venus/Mars/Jupiter/Saturn get their names?
Category: Science > Astronomy & Space
Keywords: name, history, origin, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn
Type: how
Rating:(0 ratings)    Views: 295    Discussions: 0   In Watch Lists: 1  

 
    Answer:

Nearly all ancient human cultures created names for, and stories about, the Sun, the Moon, the planets and stars. Like so many things in history, the naming of the planets happened by accident. The ancient Babylonians recognized five specks of light moving across the night skies long before the Greeks and the Romans did. They developed a belief that these specks were the moving images of five of their most important gods. Not surprisingly, they named the moving lights after these gods. When the Greeks (probably the Pythagoreans, in the fifth century BC) came into contact with the Babylonian skylore, they assigned to the same five moving lights the names of those Greek gods who seemed to correspond to the appropriate Babylonian deities most closely. Thus we got the Greek names of the five planets Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares, Zeus, and Kronos. In due course (perhaps in the second century BC) the Romans became acquainted with the Greek astronomy and the Greek planetary names. As must have been natural, the Romans rendered the Greek names to fit their own gods. This is how we obtained Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, the names we still use two thousand years later.

Source: NASA

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