Star Designation
Designations of stars (and other celestial bodies) are done by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Many of the star names in use today were inherited from the time before the IAU existed. Other names, mainly for variable stars (including novae and supernovae), are being added all the time.
Approximately 10,000 stars are visible to the naked eye. Pre-modern catalogues listed only the brightest of these. Hipparchus in the 2nd century BC enumerated about 850 stars. Johann Bayer in 1603 listed about twice this number. Only a minority of these have proper names, all others are designated by catalogization schemes. Only in the 19th century did star catalogues list the naked-eye stars exhaustively. The most voluminous modern catalogues list of the order of a billion stars, out of an estimated total of 200 to 400 billion in the Milky Way.
Read more about Star Designation: Proper Names, Catalogue Numbers, Variable Designations, Exoplanet Searches, Sale of Star Names
Famous quotes containing the words star and/or designation:
“Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“In a period of a people’s life that bears the designation “transitional,” the task of a thinking individual, of a sincere citizen of his country, is to go forward, despite the dirt and difficulty of the path, to go forward without losing from view even for a moment those fundamental ideals on which the entire existence of the society to which he belongs is built.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)