Zoozve: how a typo on a children's poster became the first 'moon' of Venus

The International Astronomical Union has just named Zoozve the first quasi-moon discovered on a planet in the Solar System, a routine decision for that organization representing the astronomical world, which is dedicated to naming and renaming all the celestial bodies by the dozen. However, Zoozve's story has several peculiarities that make it an exceptional case. A father's curiosity has ended in the firmament, a pleasant serendipity arising from a mistake. And it all started in a child's room when it was time to tuck him into the sheets.

A year ago, Latif Nasser, co-host of the science podcast Radiolab, was about to put his son to bed when he noticed a detail in the poster of planets he had in the room. Nasser, with a doctorate in History of Science from Harvard, was struck by seeing in that drawing a space body with a strange name. “Venus had a moon called Zoozve. “I had never heard of her,” remember now Nasser in a thread on the social network X. He Googled and confirmed, paradoxically, that Venus has no known moon. It is, along with Mercury, the only planet without natural satellites in the Solar System. The word “Zoozve” also did not return results in the search engines.

So Nasser ended up calling Alex Foster, the illustrator who had drawn the poster. Foster swore that he had not made it up, that he had taken it from a scientific list of moons. A friend of Nasser's who had worked at NASA found the key: it was a typo, the cartoonist had made a mistake when transcribing that name. It was not ZOOZVE, but 2002-VE, a name that corresponds to that of a space rock spotted around Venus in 2002. More specifically, its name is 2002-VE68, and it is an asteroid about 250 meters wide. And it is not a moon of Venus, because it does not have one. “But it is also NOT a moon of Venus. It is both and neither,” explains Nasser enigmatic.

It is a quasi-moon, a space object that actually orbits a star, but does so with a rhythm and stability that makes it appear that it orbits a planet. Thanks to this resonance around the two bodies, quasi-moons can accompany a planet for a long time before escaping its influence. In 2010, Zoozve approached Earth and allowed us to better analyze that rhythmic dance he maintains with Venus. The Spanish astronomers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente confirmed that 2002-VE68 will abandon its current state as venusian moon in a relatively short period: about 500 years. And they calculated that it entered this unusual dynamic state after a close encounter with Earth more than 7,000 years ago.

“With the enormous number of smaller bodies (asteroids) that exist in the solar system, it is evident that sooner or later more than one will fall into the networks of the gravitational attraction of the planets,” says Javier Armentia, astrophysicist and director of the Planetarium of Pamplona. The astronomer explains that the Earth also has quasi-satellites, the first discovered in 2010 and called 2010 Tk7. Last year it was confirmed another quasi-moon terrestrial, called Kamo'oalewa. “They are gravitational resonances, that dance of planets carried by gravity. With more observations and better analysis, more precise celestial mechanics calculations are also emerging, which look at all the details and allow us to discover that sometimes the planets trap these bodies in orbits that resemble what they do with the real Moon. So we can call them moons or quasi-moons,” explains Armentia.

For this popularizer, the Zoozve case shows how much remains to be discovered and understood about our planetary environment, and how even a mistake can lead us to learn more about the universe. “As we know more and more about the Solar System, we are also finding things that we did not think were possible. We tend to think that the Earth already has its Moon and that's it,” he points out. Zoozve's story therefore also reflects the evolution of observation and analysis techniques in astronomy from its initial discovery in 2002 to its appointment in 2024.

Among the celestial bodies named or renamed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in its latest bulletin (PDF) there are also Incamajorca —because the astronomer who discovered it is from the Majorcan town of Inca— and Pitufo, because “in Puerto Rico, the word smurf is also used as an affectionate nickname.” The Union has recently promoted original names and names of popular and ancestral cultures, but it does not always make such pleasant decisions: in 2020, it had to withdraw the name of two craters on the Moon because they corresponded to two physicists with a notable Nazi past.

The IAU describes the naming of Zoozve, “the first identified quasi-satellite of a major planet (Venus)” as follows: “When artist Alex Foster drew this object on a children's poster of the solar system, he mistook the initial characters of the provisional designation for letters , thus coining a strange and memorable nickname. Name suggested by Latif Nasser.” The promoter of the name has celebrated it on his podcast and on the networks: “They named him! Starting today, the first quasi-moon discovered in the universe is officially called Zoozve!” This story, which remembers how the universe is still full of mysteries waiting to be discovered thanks to human curiosity, can now become a beautiful fable to read before tucking the children into bed and learning astronomy by looking at the map of the planets.

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