Scanning the list of new planets WASP has found (a large proportion of which are unpublished), it occurred to me that we are getting very close to 150 planets! It also occurred to me while making the Underground Map of Wasp planets (see next post), that our planet names are really boring.
So, to both fix the naming problem and celebrate the number of WASP planets, I have decided to turn all Wasp planets into the 150 original Pokemon! Working on Wasp-12 b? Nope – You’re working on Butterfree. Wasp-6? Charizard. Wasp-64? Machoke. Wasp-135 b? Jolteon. IAU eat you heart out…
And while I know this will be a difficult thing to achieve politically, we can at least achieve it indirectly, thanks to the magic of Chrome Apps! Unfortunately I don’t have time to make a completely self-contained app for this, but here’s 4 quick steps to follow to add a bit of early-naughties humour to exoplanet science:
- Open Chrome and go here to download ‘WordReplacer’
- Find Chrome’s ‘Settings’ menu, then the ‘Extensions’ tab, then find ‘Word Replacer’ and click on options.
- Open up this pastebin in another tab, and copy the text (it’s easiest from the “Raw paste data” box at the bottom). [BONUS: Kepler names replaced by 1920s baby names with this pastebin]
- Back on Word Replacer, click ‘Import’ and paste the text in. Finally, click Save Settings and you’re good to go!
Then you get to enjoy lists such as this; or papers such as this: 
. . . . EDIT: Bonus update. Now replace all Kepler planet names with the top 2000 baby names… from the 1920s! Say hello to planets Gertrude (Kepler-127), Salvatore (312) and Ruth (Kepler-11). Use this pastebin in place of the WASP-only one above to get both!