Naming of stars

The concept of constellations has existed since the Babylonian period. Ancient stargazers combined the prominent stars with specific landscapes such as nature or mythology and imagined them into different shapes. The constellation 12 on the ecliptic became the basis of astrology, and many obvious individual stars were given exclusive names, especially those marked in Arabic and Latin.

Moreover, some constellations and the sun have their own overall myths, which are considered as the souls of the dead or gods. For example, the great spirit five represents Medusa, the gorgon.

In ancient Greece, people knew that some stars were planets (meaning "rovers"), representing various important gods. The names of these planets are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (although Uranus and Neptune are also gods in Greek and Roman mythology, their luminosity is dark, so the ancients did not find them, and their names were later named by astronomers. )。

Around the 1600 s, the names of constellations, mountains and stars were named by each region itself. 1603, the German astronomer John Bayer created a Bayer nomenclature, which combined the Greek alphabet sequence with the constellation and named each star in the constellation. Then the British astronomer John Frost invented the nomenclature of number system, which is Flemish nomenclature. Since then, directories of many other systems have been created.

In the west, Bayer, a German amateur astronomer at 1603, suggested that the stars in each constellation should be represented by the name of the constellation plus a Greek letter in the order from light to dark. For example, Orion α (Betelgeuse) and Orion β (Betelgeuse) (but actually Orion β is brighter than Orion α). If the number of stars in the constellation exceeds 24 Greek letters, lowercase Latin letters (A, B, C ...) will continue to be used, but uppercase Latin letters (A, B, C) are not enough.

Fransted, the first astronomer in Britain, founded the numerical nomenclature, which numbered the stars visible to the naked eye from west to east and from north to south in turn. The only organization in science that can name stars or celestial bodies is the International Astronomical Union. Many private companies (such as the International Star Registry) mainly sell the names of stars, but no one will use these names except the buyers who will not be recognized by the scientific community. Moreover, many institutions pretend to be astronomical institutions and deceive people into buying the names of stars.