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Five hundred years ago, no one suspected the 16th-century vessel the Nao Victoria would become the stuff of legend. In 1519, a Portuguese consul called the Spanish carrack “very old and patched up” and unfit to even “sail … to the Canaries.” Nevertheless, the Nao Victoria was chosen for a five-ship expedition, crewed by 270 men, that would come to be known as one of the most significant journeys in the history of human exploration. The captain of this unprecedented adventure was Portuguese explorer Fernão de Magalhães, anglicized Ferdinand Magellan. On September 20, 1519, he set sail aboard the flagship...

Astronomers have advocated for a renaming of two galaxies, currently named the Large and Small Megellanic Clouds after Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, due to his record of “violent colonialism.”

Names have significance, especially when they’re written in the stars. A group of astronomers is coalescing around an idea to rename two neighbors of the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Named after explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the satellite galaxies are visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. But Magellan’s name is not fitting, astronomer Mia de los Reyes and colleagues argue. The leader of the first expedition to successfully circle the globe, Magellan enslaved and killed Indigenous people encountered on the voyage, which set out from Spain in 1519 (SN: 9/17/19). “Because we’re naming things in...

Explanation: The 16th century Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result, two fuzzy cloud-like objects easily visible to southern hemisphere skygazers are known as the Clouds of Magellan, now understood to be satellite galaxies of our much larger, spiral Milky Way galaxy. About 160,000 light-years distant in the constellation Dorado, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is seen here in a remarkably deep, colorful, and annotated composite image. Spanning about 15,000 light-years or so, it is the most massive of the Milky...