Other disciplines aren’t left out of the fun, though—there’s a geologically interesting region in Australia called the “Mordor Alkaline Igneous Complex,” a pair of asteroids named “Tolkien” and “Bilbo,” and a crater on Mercury also named “Tolkien.” A spectrograph used to study certain kinds of galaxies is called the Spectrographic Areal Unit for Research on Optical Nebulae (SAURON), which has an accompanying processing system called Palantir. A palantir is Middle Earth’s equivalent of a crystal ball, allowing the holder to see anywhere in the world. Palantir is also the name of a software company that has been linked to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, which is an instance in which the reference crosses over from fun into too-real.

Naming something is one way to honor your favorite author—another is by applying your scientific expertise to analyzing Tolkien’s fictional world. And I don’t mean in a media-studies sense, though there’s of course plenty of that too. There are a remarkable number of papers purporting to scientifically study aspects of The Lord of the Rings and the world it takes place in. Much of the writing is tongue in cheek, of course, but many of these papers also incorporate actual scientific principles and methods.

A recent one, from March, published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics, wonders whether the “seemingly unachievable feats of heroism and athleticism” accomplished in the books are due to greater oxygen content in Middle Earth’s atmosphere. “The men of Middle Earth are analogous to humans on Earth,” as the study points out, so the researchers take Aragorn and his “tireless defense of Helm’s Deep” against an onslaught of evil orcs as an example.

“Although Aragorn gives his age to be 87 he displays the physical prowess of a man assumed to be in their mid-30s due to him being from a magical race of men, the Dúnedain, gifted with long life,” they write. “Therefore his age will be approximated to be 35 for the purposes of calculating his arterial partial pressure of oxygen.”

Using an equation to calculate how atmospheric makeup would affect the exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide in the lungs, they conclude that a higher percentage of oxygen in Middle Earth’s atmosphere could well play into Aragorn’s ability to stay up all night slaying orcs.

“This could also explain why creatures on Middle Earth can grow to a much larger size than they do on Earth, such as Shelob the giant spider, and how Middle Earth is home to large creatures such as dragons,” the study reads.

Other pressing Middle-Earth questions that science has tried to answer include: