Stellar designations and names | Wikipedia audio article | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2018-11-18

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Stellar designations and names | Wikipedia audio article

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"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
- Socrates



SUMMARY
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Designations and names of stars (and other celestial bodies) are 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.