Befuddled, Nasser began some research. He called scientists friends. What was Zoozve? There were no answers, just heads shaking in befuddlement.

Even a friend at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was stymied.

Was it just an error, Nasser wondered? Well, it was and wasn’t. Which was fitting, because Zoozve (real name 2002 VE68) is and isn’t a satellite of Venus.

It orbits the Sun and also appears to orbit Venus, and is therefore something called a quasi-moon. But it is much farther away than a traditional moon; will not remain in Venus’s orbit for long (7,000 years so far and about 500 years more, is the general consensus). And its primary partner isn’t Venus, but rather the Sun.

Nasser finally discovered all this when he contacted the artist who created the poster, Alex Foster. Foster recalled pulling up a list of the solar system’s moons online while illustrating the poster. He had the quasi-moon listed correctly in his notes; misread his notes while creating the poster, and Zoozve was born.

Nasser simply couldn’t believe it. Did everybody know about quasi-moons, he asked on his podcast and on his social-media feeds. What followed was a flurry. Quasi-what?

Science can be so much more relatable if we let it be more human. (Not sure if we should say Nasser says since he didn’t get back to us and he doesn’t exactly say this on the podcast) There are errors, hidden facts, typos and nicknames.

In honour of this, and in the hopes that it would get more people interested in the strange and wonderful phenomena unfolding in the skies, Nasser and his team at Radiolab wrote to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), asking if they would consider renaming 2002 VE68 Zoozve.

IAU is the global body tasked with naming major planets and their moons, defining planetary features, naming dwarf planets, meteor showers, comets, stars, constellations, asteroids, objects outside the solar system. For asteroids, it tends to use a combination of letters and numbers that follow a specific sequence.

In February, the IAU officially recognised 2002 VE68 as Zoozve, stating in its bulletin that, “when artist Alex Foster drew this object on a solar system poster for children, he mistook the initial characters of the provisional designation as letters, thus coining an odd and memorable moniker”.

Conversations like this unite even those who are mildly curious about the world beyond our eyes, says Brian Skiff, a researcher with the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, who discovered this particular quasi-moon — the first one ever described — in 2002.

Many more have been found since. Earth is found to currently have seven quasi-moons too.

“I think the renaming is a great way to spark interest in astronomy and all sciences. I was somewhat surprised that the name was accepted, perhaps testimony to Nasser’s enthusiasm in his work,” he says. “It goes to show that what we have thought to be simple phenomena in the past turns out to be more complex than we first imagine.”