Bake-eo

A Marshallese star name for γ Oph. Pronounced "bakey-yew".

Etymology and History

Necklace from sperm whale teeth, glass beads, spondylus disks, plant fiber, Marshall Islands, 1891 (Staatlichen Museums für Völkerkunde München, CC0)

This Marshallese star name was originally recorded as Bage eo by the Catholic missionary August Erdland, who lived in the Jaluit Atoll from 1904 to 1914 (Erdland 1914: 79 #15). Erdland identifies it as γ Oph but also possibly as Procyon.

Bake is the spondylus mussel whose shell is used to make necklaces. A debwāāl is a drill used to drill holes in the mussels for that purpose. The asterism Debwāāl-eo ("the drill"), identified as 67, 68 and 70 Oph (originally recorded as Räbuäl eo by Erdland), is seen next to the star Bake-eo (γ Oph), the shell itself.

Mythology

Seen as a spondylus mussel (bake), nearby Debwāāl-eo (stars in Ophiuchus) being a drill used to drill holes in the mussel to make "puka shell" necklaces (Erdland 1914: 83; Abo et al. 2019, under Debwāāl-eo; Johnson et al.)

IAU Name Discussion

The star name has been proposed to the IAU WGSN since 2021; in 2024 the group discussed to register the name Bake-eo for γ Oph (Vmag = 3.75) in the IAU-Catalog of Star Names.

References

• Abo, Takaji, Byron W. Bender, Alfred Capelle, and Tony DeBrum (2019). Marshallese-English Online Dictionary. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. https://ling.lll.hawaii.edu/dicts/MOD/.
• Erdland, P. August (1914). Die Marshall-Insulaner. Münster i.W.: Aschendorff (Bibliothèque-anthropos, 2(1)).
• Johnson, Rubellite, John Mahelona and Clive Ruggles (in press, publication expected in 2026). Nā Inoa Hōkū: Hawaiian and Pacific Star Names, 3rd edn. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.