Star designation

Designations of stars (and other celestial bodies) and their naming is currently primarily mediated in the scientific community by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a de facto authority. The IAU states that it is keen to make a distinction between the terms name and designation. To the IAU, name refers to the (usually colloquial) term used for a star in everyday speech, while designation is solely alphanumerical and used almost exclusively in official catalogues and for professional astronomy. Many of the names and some of the designations in use today were inherited from the time before the IAU existed. Other designations are being added all the time.

The Bright Star Catalogue, which is a star catalogue listing all stars of apparent magnitude 6.5 or brighter, or roughly every star visible to the naked eye from Earth, contains 9,096 stars. 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 numbers from various catalogues. Only in the 19th century did star catalogues list the naked-eye stars exhaustively. The most voluminous modern catalogues list on the order of a billion stars, out of an estimated total of 200 to 400 billion in the Milky Way.

In 2016, the 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. 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. All are included on the current IAU Catalog of Star Names, last updated on 7 November 2016.

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