Adjectives for astronomical bodies

Titanian haze

Observe the glorious titanian haze.

Oh man, I have been wanting to post again for weeks but have struggled to find the time. So it is past one o’clock in the morning, and I figure, why not?

Yesterday I found myself needing to know the adjective for Titan. I’m well acquainted with martian, jovian, and saturnian. Occasionally I encounter venusian. In terms of moons, though, I’ve only dealt with lunar and europan. But… Titan? Does it have an adjective? All the moons in our solar system—there are quite a lot—do they all get adjectives of their own?

Once again, the Internet answers everything. I found on Wikipedia this List of adjectivals and demonyms of astronomical bodies. And I found titanian. And I felt happy.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

One Response to “Adjectives for astronomical bodies”

  1. karencopyedits Says:

    Recently I had occasion to use two more adjectives: phobian and deimosian (guess which planet they belong to). Also, io9 posted on the topic and did a much more glamorous job of it than my tiny little blog: http://io9.com/what-do-you-call-an-alien-from-uranus-728804752. They have different adjectives for Deimos, but I prefer deimosian as it is closer to the noun form.


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