Named stars

This is a list of proper names of stars. These are the names of stars that have been in somewhat recent usage. See also the lists of stars by constellation, which give variant names, derivations, and magnitudes.

Of the roughly 10,000 stars visible to the naked eye, only a few hundred have been given proper names in the history of astronomy. Traditional astronomy tends to group stars into asterisms, and give proper names to those, not to individual stars.

Many star names are in origin descriptive of the part of the asterism they are found in; thus Phecda, a corruption of the Arabic -فخذ الدب- fakhth al-dubb "thigh of the bear". Only a handful of the brightest stars have individual proper names not depending on their asterism; so Sirius "the scorcher", Antares and Canopus (of unknown origin), Alphard "the solitary one", Regulus "kinglet"; and arguably Aldebaran "the follower" (of the Pleiades), Procyon "preceding the dog [Sirius]". The same holds for Chinese astronomy, where most stars are enumerated within their constellation, with a handful of exceptions such as 織女 "weaving girl" (Vega).

In addition to the limited number of traditional star names, there are some coined in modern times, e.g. "Avior" for Epsilon Carinae (1930), and a number of stars named after people (mostly in the 20th century).

The IAU Working Group on Star Names since 2016 has been publishing a list of star names. As of November 2017, the list included a total of 313 proper names of stars.

In 2016, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN's first bulletin dated July 2016 included a table of the first two batches of names approved by the WGSN (on 30 June and 20 July 2016) together with names of stars adopted by the IAU Executive Committee Working Group on Public Naming of Planets and Planetary Satellites during the 2015 NameExoWorlds campaign and recognized by the WGSN. There are 125 stars on the list. Further batches of names were approved on 21 August 2016, 12 September 2016, 5 October 2016 and 6 November 2016. These were listed in a table included in the WGSN's second bulletin dated November 2016. There are 102 stars on this list. The next additions were done on 1 February 2017 with 13 new star names, on 30 June 2017 with 29 star names, on 5 September 2017 with 41 star names, and on 17 November 2017 with 3 star names. All are included in the current IAU Catalog of Star Names, last updated on 17 November 2017.

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