Ken Tapping, November 3, 2004

A few weeks ago I saw in an astronomy magazine a letter from a friend of mine, who suggested that we should abandon all those strange Arabic and Greek names we have for stars, and stick solely to the system set up by Bayer in the 17^th Century. He used the Greek alphabet, calling the brightest star in a constellation alpha, the second beta and so on. A week ago I had an e-mail from someone about getting a star named after a loved one.

For scientific astronomy Bayer had a point, but astronomy is a lot more than just science. It is a picture of our culture and mythology. Those star names came from ancient astronomers, navigators, and other people who looked at the sky. Each star name carries a story with it. For example, in the eastern sky these evenings, to the left of the Pleiades, is a bright, orange-red star. It is Aldebaran. This comes from the Arabic Al Dabaran – "The Follower", or Na'ir al Dabaran – "The Bright Follower", because this star seems to follow the Pleiades across the sky. This star was one of the "Royal Stars" of ancient Persia, the others being Antares, Regulus and Fomalhaut. It is connected with the gods of the rain, and with the fertility of the Earth. This star was mentioned by Chaucer and in Spenser's Faerie Queen. If you look into the eastern sky during the early morning, you'll see the most brilliant star in our sky after the Sun. It's called Sirius, which means "Sparkling One". Names like Aldebaran and Sirius sound a lot more romantic than Alpha Tauri and Alpha Canis Majoris. Both the Bayer and the old names have their places; we need them both.

Since the starry sky is for us a beautiful, mystic and mysterious place, it is reasonable that people might want to name a star after a loved one, and have a permanent memorial in the night sky. This obvious idea has led to a number of companies offering this service. You pay a fee, and you get a certificate saying that the star originally known as, for example, Denebola, or Beta Leonis as Bayer would call it, is now named "Angela Smith". However, such services are mild scams, and the certificates are of novelty value only. The official name of the star remains Denebola.

Over the last two or three hundred years, astronomy has become a very international activity, with more astronomers than there has ever been before. It became impractical for stars and other astronomical objects to have different names in different countries. Common, internationally accepted names had to be agreed on, and doing this is a lot of work. The naming of astronomical objects is now, by international agreement, the responsibility of the International Astronomical Union. This avoids anarchy and naming stars after people who might be regarded with acclaim in some countries but reviled in others. The IAU also names landmarks on astronomical bodies, and new objects that are discovered.

Incidentally, Aldebaran is about 40 times larger than the Sun, has about 125 times the Sun's energy output, and lies about 68 light years away, that is, roughly 680,000,000,000,000 km.

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Ken Tapping is an astronomer at the National Research Council Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics (NRC-HIA), and is based at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, Penticton, BC, V2A 6J9 Tel (250) 493-2277, Fax (250) 493-7767,
E-mail: ken.tapping@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca