When you’re spending 40 hours a week sifting through data and up all night watching the clouds obscure all the galaxies you’re meant to be looking at, it’s the little goofy things that make it worth it. Goofy things like naming your satellite BICEP.

I’ve collected a list of my favorite acronyms so far in astrophysics for us to laugh at.

There’s quite a few that pop up in papers and I couldn’t list them all. Here’s a list of a few of my top ones with a brief description, but if you’ve got any more, please comment them because I need a good laugh!

SExtractor – This is a very impressive software that detects and classifies sources from images taken from telescopes!

OGLE – Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. I think the name explains it pretty well. It’s doubly funny given that we’re literally ogling at galaxies.

SAURON – Spectroscopic Areal Unit for Research on Optical Nebulae. This is a spectrograph designed for recording multiple spectra at a time over a large patch of sky.

ARGOS – Advanced Research and Global Observation Satellite. This is also a British retail company. I used to flick through the 1000 page catalogue as a daily hobby in my childhood. This might explain why I am the way I am.

BICEP – Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization. This project is about observing the polarization of the CMB. BICEP also has a sequel, BICEP 2.

BOOMERanG – Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics. This was an experiment using a stratostat balloon to measure the CMB.

ORFEUS – Orbiting and Retrievable Far and Extreme Ultraviolet Spectrometer. If you search up ORFEUS you actually get about 5 different things using the same acronym! I found this funny only because it isn’t the correct spelling of Orpheus.

MACHOS and WIMPS – These were and are dark matter candidates. MACHOs are MAssive Compact Halo Objects (i.e dark planets and brown dwarfs). WIMPS are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (particles that don’t interact much or at all with light, but do interact with gravity).

TAROT – Télescope à Action Rapide pour les Objets Transitoires (Rapid-Action Telescope for Transient Objects) is designed for transient objects like gamma-ray bursts and exoplanets.

CBAT – Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. This website has to stay somewhat professional so I cannot explain the joke here. You’ll have to read this reddit post instead.

JUICE – JUpiter ICy moons Explorer. The only reason I include this is because they don’t even use the “M” in the word moons in the acronym! That is stretching it in my books!

And finally, I must bid you adieu…or should I say…

ADIOS - Adiabatic Inflow-Outflow Solutions. This is a very well-used model for accretion and other magnetohydrodynamical situations.

Make your own!

If you want to be an astrophysicist, you might have to make an acronym for your proposed project. One of my own professors and his colleagues came up with THESEUS for their proposed mission for ESA’s Cosmic Vision, so I thought I’d give it a go!

Below are some of my professor’s names turned into acronyms:

DARREN – DARk matter REdshift missioN

GABBY – GrAvitationally-lensed Black BodY

RICHARD – Radio to Infra-red Cosmic High energy AstRonomical Detector

MERV – Magnetic-Electric Radio Voltmeter (one could argue that this is just a regular voltmeter)

SERGEI – Search for Extra-terrestrial Regions with Geothermal EmIssions.

NIAL – Near-Infrared Automatic Lensing experiment

PAUL – Phoenix A ULtraviolet explorer

(21/02/24) My friend’s also have some suggestions:

LIGMA – Lunar Imaging & Geographical Mapping Apparatus