Humorist Douglas Adams is gone, but the hero of his Hitchhiker鈥檚 Guide to the Galaxy lives on, as the name of asteroid 18610 Arthurdent.
The new name was among 206 announced May 9 by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but word apparently never reached Adams, who died of a heart attack on May 11, aged 49.
The unfortunate coincidence sounds as if it might have been written by Adams, who invented an Infinite Improbability Drive as an alternative to 鈥渁ll that tedious mucking about with hyperspace鈥�.
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The best-selling books, which Adams called a 鈥渇ive-volume trilogy,鈥� began as a BBC radio series and were later aired on BBC television.
Life, the Universe and everything
Asteroid hunters traditionally have the right to name their discoveries, giving 鈥渁n extra thrill鈥� for amateur astronomers, says Brian Marsden, who heads the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Felix Hormuth, a German amateur who found asteroid Arthurdent on 7 February 1998 with a 45-centimetre telescope in Heppenheim, proposed the name early this year to honour Adams, but it had to be approved by an international committee.
Dent was an ordinary earthling whom in Hormuth鈥檚 words was 鈥渃onfronted with the adversities of life, the universe and everything in a highly amusing and entertaining way,鈥� in Adams鈥� books.
The asteroid Arthurdent is also quite ordinary. It is a member of the main belt, a few kilometres in diameter, with a four-year orbit between Mars and Jupiter that comes nowhere near the Earth.