From the rain forest to planet Huya

You no longer have to be a Greek or Roman god to have a planet, or at least a mini-planet, named after you. You can be a Venezuelan rain god, for instance. This just in from our sources in Venezuela:

A “mini-planet” far out in our solar system, discovered by astronomers at a Venezuelan observatory, will bear the name Huya (Juyá), the rain god of the Wayúu Indians who live on the arid Guajira Peninsula of northern Venezuela and Colombia.

The Wayúu hope that their god, from his new vantage point in the company of Neptune and Pluto, will work some miracle to alleviate the thirst their lands have suffered for several generations.

Juyá measures some 600 km in diameter and is composed of rock and ice. It is located in the outer reaches of the band of celestial bodies beyond Neptune, known as the Kuiper Belt, after the man who discovered it in 1951, Dutch-U.S. astronomer Gerard Kuiper.

Larger than the asteroids in its group, it is a tiny planet, barely a quarter the size of Pluto, the smallest of the nine in the solar system.

How did the astronomers settle on the name Huya?

The name Juyá was chosen from among more than 20 names considered by astronomers, anthropologists and Wayúu leaders, headed by Jorge Pocaterra. Juyá — god of rain, a warrior, hunter, seducer and inhabitant of “the place beyond the Sun.”

To facilitate its pronunciation in English, the spelling has been altered to “Huya.”

And now all of us English speakers can yell, “Hip Hip Huya!”