How are constellations named?

In the era of Russian czar, a nobleman wrote a letter to the famous Pulkov Observatory. He pretended to be humorous: "You probably won't forget to feed' Big Bear' every night, will you?" In fact, in the past feudal dynasties, many people often used some astronomical stories as embellishments to be arty. ...

How can there be a "big bear" in the colorful sky? This is because, in the era of eating animals and blood, the greatest talent of human beings is to identify the stars in the sky, because they can point out the direction and tell people the time and season, so as to better hunt and cultivate. In order to identify the stars in the sky, the ancients "combined" some nearby stars according to their own imagination. For example, in ancient China, the starry sky was divided into "three walls and twenty-eight lodges" and was imagined as a hierarchical and orderly "fairy dynasty", from the emperor and prince to the prince and general. ...

In ancient Babylon, the stars were matched into constellations, and after they were spread to Greece, they were associated with myths, so apart from those heroic images, the sky was a magical zoo. This also reflects from one side that animals have been indispensable friends of human beings since ancient times.

At first, people did whatever they wanted. Some people even pull some stars together to make "constellations" to please their lovers and give them her name. /kloc-in the 8th century, an English astronomer insisted on naming a "George Harp Constellation" to please the king of England, and then the German "Crown Constellation of frederick the great" appeared, while the French wanted to rename Orion "Napoleon Constellation" ... The constellations were once in chaos, which made people laugh and cry.

In order to systematically study the starry sky and conduct international academic exchanges, the International Astronomical Union decided in 1928 to clean up the original data: all the sky should be divided according to "meridian" (called right ascension) and "latitude" (right ascension), and the whole day should be divided into 88 regions of different sizes, each region is a constellation, and each constellation occupies a large or small starry sky. The largest Virgo and Ursa Major are 18 times as large as the smallest Sagittarius and Sagittarius, and there are many stars (visible to the naked eye). For example, both Centauri and Swan have 65,438+050 stars, while Sagittarius has only 65,438+00 stars and corvus corax has only 65,438+05 visible stars.

For the naming of constellations, the International Astronomical Union has taken into account historical habits, except for those not serious constellations, such as the "female cat constellation", most of them have been preserved. In this way, except that the constellations in the southern sky are only known in modern times, they are named after some modern instruments such as clocks, compasses and sextants. Most constellations are still the world of animals and heroes.

The names of constellations are varied, but half of them, that is, 44 constellations, are all animals, not only bears, bears, swans and dolphins, but also dragons, unicorns and phoenixes that are not found in the world. Among them, there are 20 species of mammals, 8 species of birds, 5 species of reptiles, 4 species of fish and 2 species of insects, so some people jokingly call this constellation "the zoo in the sky".

However, in essence, the constellation itself is a combination with no practical significance. The stars in the same constellation may be hundreds of thousands of miles apart, which is simply "strange bedfellows" and has nothing to do with it. For example, among the eight brightest stars A, β, γ, δ, ε, ζ, η and θ, the nearest lion β is only 42 light years away from us, while the farthest lion ε is 326 light years away! What's more, these eight stars also go their separate ways, some are moving away from us, some are moving closer to us, and their running speed is between several kilometers and dozens of kilometers per second, so after hundreds of thousands of years, the shape of the lion will change beyond recognition.