What’s in a name?

When I was thinking about a name for the package, I suddenly remembered a line from Carl Sagan and Bishun N. Khare’s paper on tholins, organic compounds formed by irradiating simple compounds, such as carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, and so on, with electromagnetic radiation or cosmic rays. They said, and I quote (all weird formatting mine):

For the past decade we have been producing in our laboratory a variety of complex organic solids from mixtures of the cosmically abundant gases CH₄, C₂H₆, NH₃, H₂O, HCHO, and H₂S. The product, synthesized by ultraviolet (UV) light or spark discharge, is a brown, sometimes sticky, residue, which has been called, because of its resistance to conventional analytical chemistry, “intractable polymer”. […] We propose, as a model-free descriptive term, ‘tholins’ (Gk. ϴὸλος, muddy; but also ϴoλòς, vault or dome), although we were tempted by the phrase:

‘star-tar’.

From: Tholins: organic chemistry of interstellar grains and gas.
Carl Sagan and Bishun Narain Khare
Nature 277, 102–107 (1979).

The last part must have really struck me, considering how I remembered it so well even after reading it several years earlier! Since this package is all about molecules in space, I decided to call it spacetar instead of star-tar. As we get better at detecting molecules fro interstellar spectra, we have started to discover molecules of increasing complexity, making the name more and more appropriate 😁 !