I thought this would be trivial to Google but I am not having any luck. How many named stars are there in the sky? Named like Sirius and not like XQÑ-3576.
About 70, afaik
Only the brightest stars were named in the old days.
It depends on whether or not you include “Alpha Centauri A” as a name *like XQÑ-3576. * Assuming you don’t, I count just under 70.
Really, that few?. There are more constellations than named stars?
(And no, I don’t count Alpha Centauri as a name, even though it is a bit of a household name)
I would have expected the ancients to name a lot more stars since they didn’t have light pollution to filter their view of the sky.
Can all the named stars be seen in our light polluted city skies (varying by location, of course)?
Define “star”. Do you mean the pinpoints of light you see in the sky? Because by that measure, you could say that Sirius, say, has a name. Alternately, though, do you mean the individual balls of glowing gas out in space? Because then you’ve got to deal with two different stars, Sirius-A and Sirius-B, and you’d be forced to say either that they both have names, or that neither does. Then there are all those Southern Hemisphere stars that weren’t on the old Mediterranean lists, and which therefore have rather unimaginative names: Does “Acrux” count as a name, given that it’s just a shortened form of “alpha Crucis”?
Given that what gets named is generally what people actually see, I’d assume that you meant the spots of light, but there are a lot more named stars than just that handful of brightest ones. Off the top of my head, Mizar is on that list but its visible companion Alcor isn’t, for instance, and all of the visible Pleiades have names, too.
Is “Rigel Kentaurus” better, then? What about Proxima Centauri (which is not naked-eye visible). And would something like “Barnard’s star” or “the Pistol Star” count as names?
Points of light. So yes, Sirius is one star with one name.
I guess Acrux is not since you are saying it is just short for Alpha Crucis and we are saying Alpha Centauri is not a named star.
You do bring a good point. Are named stars concentrated on the northern hemisphere since the names come from northern hemisphere dwellers? What’s the most recent named star? When did we stop naming them and just cataloging them with serials?
Rigel Kentaurus (or Toliman) does count as a name. So does Proxima Centauri, I guess. Barnard and Pistol definitely count if they are registered somewhere. Evangeline (as in The Princess and the Frog) is not since it is a name someone gave it and it is not widely recognized.
So let’s go with the broadest possible definition of named star and say that any name that is not just a letter-constellation name that is registered in any widely accepted astronomical catalog counts.
That list doesn’t include my favorite star, Shurnarkabti Shashutu, (Zeta Tauri). That list doesn’t include many of the named stars in Taurus, depending on what your standards are for what constitutes a name.
Wiki says “Estimates of the number of stars with recognised proper names range from 300 to 350 different stars”.
But what about all the [del]suckers[/del] people who paid to have stars named after their friends?
Both are listed under those names in SIMBAD, the standard database of objects used by astronomers. There’s probably some way to search for all objects in the database which have a name and which are stars, but I don’t know offhand what it would be.
Ok, yes, that’s a good cite. But still, many of those names are no better than *Alpha Centauri *. For example “*Delta Scorpii (δ Sco / δ Scorpii) is a star in the constellation Scorpius. It has the traditional name Dschubba (or Dzuba, from Arabic jabhat, “forehead” (of the scorpion)” * Or Acrux (α Cru / α Crucis / Alpha Crucis/ HD 108248) is the brightest star in constellation Crux, the Southern Cross…“Acrux” is simply a contraction of the A in Alpha plus Crux." Or Fear Itself fave "*Zeta Tauri (ζ Tau / ζ Tauri) is a binary star in the constellation Taurus, the Bull. Known to the ancient Babylonians as Shurnarkabti-sha-shutu, meaning “the star in the bull towards the south,” *
In other words, it’s name is a place name in the constellation. My rough estimate is that about 2/3rd of the traditional names for stars are based upon their place names in a constellation. So, then around 100?
If you’re going to exclude all of those, though, you’re going to have to throw out such well-known stars as Rigel, Deneb, and arguably Vega and Betelgeuse (although Vega’s name represents an alternative interpretation of the constellation of which it is a part, and Betelgeuse has gotten garbled over time).
I’m not sure I go along with that. By that logic, there are only 45 named US states, because North Dakota and South Dakota are just locations in the Dakotas, and so on.
How old a name do you want? Many of the names we use today are simply a Greek letter and the name of the constellation, which isn’t much of a name. The letters, counting from the beginning of the Greek alphabet, indicate the order of brightness in the constellation. Thus “omega Ceti” is thus “the 18th brightest star in the Constellation Cetus”. These names are a combination of what’s in Ptolemy’s circa first century catalog the Syntaxis (AKA the Almagest) along with Johann Bayer’s 1603 Uranometria. Bayer named 1,564 stars, which might be close to your answer.
Even looking at Ptolemy’s names, you find that many translate to things like “the bright one in the Lion’s Head” and suchlike.
Many of the “traditional” names are medieval Arabic names, and are usually descriptive names similar to Ptolemy’s – “Betelgeuse” is probably something like “The Armpit of the Giant”, although there’s some controversy about that.
And, of course, there have been names added since Bayer. “Omicron Ceti” is also called “Mira”, ever since Hevelius wrote a book about this first-to-be-generally-recognized variable star, entitled Historiola Mirae Stellae in 1662. (So that having Sheikh Ilderim name one of his chariot horses “Mira” in Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, set at the time of Christ, is an anachronism). We’ve since added other star names, like the aforementioned Barnard’s Star.
If you look at the non-descriptive star names, there are damned few, like Sirius, Regulus, and Spica (and arguably Polaris, although that’s kinda descriptive) – I’d guess much fewer than 100.
Wait, according to that list, there are over 100 named stars just starting with the letter A and of which only a handful are * Secundus or similarly descriptive names.
Now cases like Betelgeuse kinda break my question. They are names that don’t sound like descriptive names to us but they were just that originally.
But the thing is, nearly all names are like that if you go back far enough.
I don’t see why that should be a disqualifier. Not many people speak Babylonian any more. To point out that they were just noting positions in Babylonian seems rather pedantic. Lots of terrrestrial place names originated as descriptions of their location, but have lost those meanings as language changed.
I don’t know; there seems to me to be a real difference between a designation which means, say, “the heart of the lion”, and one which just means “the brightest star in the lion”. I mean, clearly every constellation must have a brightest star (and a second-brightest, and generally a third-brightest and so on), but not every constellation necessarily has a heart (or armpit, or tail, or whatever). There’s no imagination or creativity in deciding which star is brighter than another, but there is creativity in deciding whether a cluster of stars is an udder or a scrotum (I had a roommate once who described the Pleiades as “the udder of Taurus”).
Is he one of the creators of “Back at the Barnyard”?