Hawaiian Names in Astronomy, or, Fun with Regular Expressions!

I'm currently working on a post for Astrobites about the pronunciation of Hawaiian names due to the fact that there are a few Hawaiian names already used in astronomy and will likely be more in the future, so I figured it would be good for astronomers to be able to pronounce them correctly. I already knew of a few Hawaiian names used in astronomy, but it got me wondering if there were any I didn't know about. For reference, the ones I knew about beforehand were:

1. Haumea, a likely dwarf planet on the outskirts of the Solar System (and its two moons Hiʻiaka and Nāmaka),
2. Laniakea, the name of the galaxy supercluster to which our own Milky Way belongs,
3. and ʻOumuamua, the first known interstellar interloper.

I wondered, while writing, if there were additional Hawaiian names among the named minor bodies in the Solar System (besides Haumea), so I decided to search for them using the power of Python and regular expressions.

Regular expressions, in computing terms, are a sort of meta-language used for matching specific patterns in text. There's no official standard for them, but there are a few informal standard “dialects” which many different languages (including Python) adhere to. At their simplest, a regular expression can be a literal search—for instance, in the sentence:

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,”

I could make a regular expression to match the single, literal word “fox.” You'll be familiar with this if you've ever tried to search for something in a text file. However, the power of regular expressions comes from their ability to search for more abstract combinations of letters (or numerals, or punctuation). For instance, I could also make a more complicated regular expression that matches “any group of three letters, surrounded by whitespace or punctuation, where the middle letter is a vowel and the outer letters are consonants,” which would match fox and dog, but not the.

The specific syntax is fairly complicated, so I won't go into it here. Instead, I'll walk through the conceptual process of how I used regular expressions to find Hawaiian names in the IAU list of named minor Solar System bodies.

1. I first visited this IAU webpage, which has a conveniently-alphabetized list of all 21,922 named minor bodies, saved the list to a text file, and read its contents using Python.
2. I then took advantage of the fact that Hawaiian orthography is quite regular (no pun intended). All words in Hawaiian are made of one or more syllables, which are composed of exactly one vowel or diphthong (two vowels), and which may optionally have exactly one consonant at the start. We can be smart about it by only looking for consonants which actually appear in Hawaiian (h, k, l, m, n, p, w, ʻ), and we can also exclude any words which have the same vowel repeated twice in a row, since those don't show up in Hawaiian words. (They do show up in Hawaiian words when the ʻokina isn't written, but I figured any Hawaiian names in the list would be recent enough that the person naming them would have taken care to use the correct letters, so I decided not to worry about potentially missing some this way.)
3. This returned 288 matches, and is also where I ran out of clever tricks. Unfortunately, there are a lot of names in the list which could be Hawaiian names, but aren't (as far as I know) For instance, the first result, by numerical order on the list, is asteroid 32 Pomona. This could be a perfectly fine Hawaiian name, but it's not; it's the name of a Roman goddess of fruit trees (at least, I know it was named for the Roman goddess, I can't actually say that Pomona doesn't occur as a name in Hawaiian somewhere). At this point I sifted through the remaining names in the list and checked each one on the IAU website, which, conveniently enough, includes an explanation of where most of the names come from or who they're named for.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I found 15 names of definite Hawaiian origin, in addition to Haumea. (I discarded one, 197708 Kalipona, which didn't have an explanation and which I wasn't sure about.) Here they are, in numerical order:

• 2202 Pele: named after the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. Name given in 1972, which is the earliest I could definitively find.
• 7613 ʻAkikiki: a critically-endangered honeycreeper native to Kauaʻi.
• 14764 Kīlauea: named for Kīlauea volcano on Hawaiʻi island. (I notice that although the names I found correctly use the ʻokina, they don't seem to use the kahakō that indicate long vowels, so I'll add them as appropriate when I'm aware of them.)
• 88297 Huikilolani: the name of the Hawaiian Astronomical Society, “Hui Kilolani,” which translates to “club of sky watchers.”
• 123290 Mānoa: a valley and residential district on Oʻahu. (Where the University of Hawaii at Manoa is located, I presume.)
• 136108 Haumea, which we've already seen, but it serves as a good consistency check!
• 171183 Haleakalā: the largest and tallest volcano on Maui, where a number of observatories reside.
• 284891 Kona: named for the region on the west side of Hawaiʻi.
• 342431 Hilo: my favorite place to live!
• 115801 Punahou: a school in Honolulu.
• 361267 ʻIʻiwi: a species of brilliant scarlet honeycreeper found in Hawaii.
• 374710 ʻŌʻō: an extinct genus of Hawaiian birds.
• 378002 ʻAkialoa: an extinct genus of Hawaiian honeycreepers. (Noticing a pattern yet?)
• 388282 ʻAkepa: a type of crossbill bird endemic to the Hawaiian islands, though likely extinct on all but Hawaiʻi. (ʻAkepa means “agile” in Hawaiian.)
• 469219 Kamoʻoalewa: an unusual asteroid which is currently the most stable quasi-satellite of Earth; it orbits the Sun with nearly the same orbit, and never gets too far away. One of two asteroids named by the new A Hui He Inoa program, an initiative for helping get more Hawaiian names into astronomy.
• 514107 Kaʻepaokaʻāwela: an unusual asteroid which orbits in a 1:1 resonance with Jupiter, but in a retrograde orbit. The other asteroid named by A Hui He Inoa.

So there we have it, a list of all the Hawaiian names I can find currently used in astronomy. If you know of any more, I'd be interested to hear of them—it's possible I could've missed some. It's certainly a lot more than I knew of before I started! A hui hou!