Bake-eo
Bake-eo
A Marshallese star name for γ Oph. Pronounced "bakey-yew".
Etymology and History
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 (alpha Canis Minoris).
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 (SIMBAD-link) with Vmag = 3.75 in the IAU-Catalog of Star Names. gam Oph currently lacks a name in SIMBAD. Astrophysically, gam Oph is a bright, nearby (distance ~ 30 parsecs) star that was one of the original A0V spectral type and photometric standard stars that helped define the zero points of the Johnson UBV photometric system (Johnson & Morgan 1953; 1953ApJ...117..313J).
We don't know (yet) what map the author was using to ascribe the Marshallese names to stars with Bayer and Flamsteed designations - because some of the names for the stars and asterisms are for quite surprising stars: e.g. "Lerrik ran nejin Jabro" are attributed to the faint pair pi Tau (V=4.7mag) and 71 Tau (V=4.5mag) in the Hyades. Additionally, they have the curious alias "Rediculus" for alpha Pavonis, which seems to be unique to German 19th cen and early 20th cen navigation works (e.g. Stupar 1908).
Are there alternative cultural names for gam Oph?
gam Oph is part of the Zongzheng asterism (Sun & Kistemaker 1997; "The Chinese Sky During the Han: Constellating Stars and Society") from the Shi shi xingjing Star Catalogue.
Aldurajah (Moore & Rees 2011). This is one of dozens of star names that appear in Moore & Rees that appear to have dubious origins. The name obviously sounds Arabic, but it does not appear as a celestial name in any other source that covers either indigenous Arabian or scientific Arabic names that I've seen. Mentions online appear to be mainly over the past decade after the publication of Moore & Rees 2011.
Muliphen (Allen 1899) "but I cannot trace it here, although this title is famous in other parts of the sky". Regardless of the etymology, the name is non-unique and the WGSN already adopted "Muliphein" for gam CMa.
Is the hyphen necessary?
Why not just "Bakeeo" which would ease the lives of astrophysicists? We've not needed hyphens for any of the previous IAU star names. Among ~24,000 IAU names for asteroids, exoplanets, satellites, and stars, they are used sparingly (200 instances or ~0.8%), and all of which are for asteroids - and for proper names where a hyphen was usually used for a modern proper name (e.g., (11274) Castillo-Rogez) or for some modern transliterations of ancient proper names (e.g. (11156) Al-Khwarismi).
However, writing it "Bakeeo" would introduce a lot of confusion. This is not only because it would tempt people to pronounce it "Bak-ee-yew" rather than "Bak-ey-yew" (i.e. putting in a long "ee" sound, which is wrong, as long and short vowels are distinct in many Pacific languages). The double-vowel is an orthographic nightmare anyway owing to its ambiguous use by various ethnographers, sometimes to represent a long "ey" sound (properly transcribed as "ē", as opposed to "ī" which represents the long "ee" sound) and sometimes to represent "e‘e", i.e. two short "ey" sounds separated by a glottal stop, which is incorrectly omitted. You see what I mean about the confusion. Actually, "Bake‘eo" would be closest to the actual pronunciation, but the glottal stop is not used in Marshallese, so that spelling would be misleading. So we are stuck with "Bake-eo".
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.
