About Star Designation

Throughout human history, humankind has looked up at the sky and tried to make sense of what he saw. Eventually, the confused jumble of stars became constellations with names and stories assigned to them, certain, particularly bright stars were given their own names. Each major world culture, religion and empire had their own special way of naming and classifying what they saw in the night sky. The ancient Greeks, for example, noticed that certain stars in the night sky tended to shine more brightly than other heavenly bodies and would regularly change position in the sky at fixed intervals and locations. To us its obvious that these wandering stars are actually the planets within our own solar system – in fact the word 'planet' comes from the Greek word for these wandering stars; planetes.

Eventually, it became necessary for astronomers to have a system for classifying heavenly bodies. The first attempts took place when individuals such as the German astronomer Johann Bayer created a star map in 1600 using the Greek names for constellations and assigning a Greek letter to each star constellation. This system was further refined and expanded upon by other astronomers over the years. Today we have the International Astronomical Union who handles the designations for all celestial bodies. The IAU naming scheme is the one used by scientists all over the world.

Most of the star names used by IAU are derived from the traditional Greek, Latin and Arabic names, but for relatively new celestial objects like supernovas and quasars, they come up with their own naming schemes. Mostly, stars that have been historically observed by the naked eye have traditional names attached to them, but with modern telescopes and radio astronomy, we can see millions more stars on the sky; naming all of them would not be feasible. The human impossibility of naming each start causes that due to this, the majority of known stars and objects in the sky as known by their catalogue names. These catalogues are compiled by various organizations that conduct astronomical surveys.