Hitchens orbits Mars, Jupiter, and Earth.

December 7, 2011

Asteroid Named for Christopher Hitchens
By Juli Weiner | Vanity Fair

An asteroid discovered by Ted Bowell, the former director of the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search, has been named after Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/12/Asteroid-Named-for-Christopher-Hitchens

Posted by Tom at 06:25

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6 comments:

Anonymous said...
December 7, 2011 at 7:14 AM  

Nice!

 
Unknown said...
December 7, 2011 at 8:07 AM  

Did I miss it? Or is the asteroid just called "Hitchens"?

 
Anonymous said...
December 7, 2011 at 10:48 AM  

A brilliant idea.

I have a minor quibble with the following statement in the Vanity Fair piece:
"The asteroid orbits Mars, Jupiter, and Earth."
This plainly cannot be the case. I suspect what this should say is that the Hitchens asteroid orbits the Sun on an elliptical path that crosses the orbits if the named planets.

 
Mary said...
December 8, 2011 at 6:48 PM  

Wow! That's awesome.

 
civil libertarian said...
December 9, 2011 at 6:42 AM  

frank zappa had an asteroid named after him. I believe it was known as asteroid zappafrank. :) ; there's another great subversive genius cancer just couldn't live without, no pun intended. I had some more to say about that but I guess I'll save that for this new triumph of the will article. Certainly there were differences between the two masterminds but this much is sure: They both had the same favorite vegetable, each was a gifted subversive genius, both will be dearly missed, neither of them will ever be forgotten. Welcome to the asteroid field hitch. You're in good company!

 
J. Gravelle said...
December 13, 2011 at 6:49 PM  

If it ever crashes to Earth, I'd lay odds it will topple an ivory tower...


-jjg
DailyScoff.com

 

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Christopher reads from Hitch-22: A Memoir