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Any moniker that receives at least 1,000 votes earns its nominator the chance to "adopt" (and name) the exoplanet of his or her choice. Such winners will also receive an adoption certificate, links to detailed information about the adopted planet and $100 in Uwingu store credits, company officials said. [The Strangest Alien Planets (Gallery)]

Adopt-a-Planet is similar to a month-long contest Uwingu staged recently to give a people's-choice name to Alpha Centauri Bb, the closest known exoplanet to Earth at just 4.3 light-years away. (The winner: Albertus Alauda.)

The new adoption effort, however, is open-ended and seeks names for many different alien worlds.

"We're happy to have winner after winner after winner," Uwingu CEO Alan Stern, a former NASA science chief who also heads the agency's New Horizons mission to Pluto, told SPACE.com. "There are plenty of exoplanets out there."

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The International Astronomical Union has traditionally approved official names for celestial bodies. So far, the organization has not moved to change the planet-naming status quo, in which alien worlds take the name of their host star along with a lowercase letter. The first planet discovered in a particular system is designated "b" (since the star is implicitly "a"), the second "c" and so on.

Astronomers first confirmed an alien planet orbiting a sunlike star in 1995. Since then, they've discovered more than 700 exoplanets (or more than 800, depending on whose tally is consulted), with thousands more awaiting confirmation by follow-up observations.

For more information on the Adopt-a-Planet campaign, visit Uwingu's website here: http://www.uwingu.com/a-public-name-for-bb/#.UUmNKBxQGSp.

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