It’s the prefixes, really. The inner geek in all of us is irrationally impressed by longer titles of scientific fields, whose extra syllables connote don’t-worry-about-it, you-wouldn’t-understand importance.
This, ultimately, was the argument a friend of mine once made when explaining his choice to study astrophysics rather than regular old vanilla physics in college. Sure, there was something about the subject matter in there too, but it was mostly about the cool factor, amplified by that prefix.
Which is all to say that Dale Warren Griffin, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey in St. Petersburg, Florida, may have just created the coolest scientific field ever: astrovirology.
"Astrovirlogy" is just a sub-category of astrobiology. To read more, click here.