Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse!
Did it explode?? No? OK, then.
But it seems fair to ask: why “Betelgeuse”? It is a rare name for a star. Because it is a corrupted translation of the Arabic phrase yad al-jawzā’which roughly translates to “Orion’s hand”, a fitting nickname for the star that represents the raised arm of the constellation.
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Many of the star names we use today are of Arabic origin; Alexandrian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy he created a star map of the sky for his popular book Mathematical TreatiseWritten in Greek around 150 AD. It was translated into Arabic more than 1,000 years ago and acquired the nickname. Almagest— itself a corruption of the Greek version of the word for “greatest” — and many of these Arabic versions of star names were retained even when the map was translated into different languages. Rigel, Deneb Aldebaran, and many of the brightest stars in the sky owe their names to such trivia in ancient publications.
Others began as nicknames, such as Polaris named for its position in the sky near the north celestial pole, and Ruddy Antares, which literally means “Rival of Mars.” Others are named after the astronomers who studied them, such as Barnard’s star and van Maanen’s star. This is obviously less than ideal naming methodology, sometimes causing confusion as to what a star should actually be called.
You could even think that we would run out of names, because there are thousands of stars that are visible at night. However, fewer than 1,000 stars have proper names, so it doesn’t seem like a crisis, which is good, because they are. hundreds of billions Milky Way stars! So the problem is not just naming them consistently.
Different ancient cultures had their own names for the stars, but as the world became interconnected astronomers tried many systems to standardize names and nameswith varying degrees of success.
One of the first of the modern era, published in 1603, was dreamed up by the German astronomer Johann Bayer. He named each star according to the apparent brightness ranking of a particular constellation, using a Greek letter and the genitive (possessive) case of its constellation name. So, for example, the brightest star in Orion would be called Alpha Orionis, the next brightest Beta Orionis, and so on. This system has two problems, however. First, the Greek alphabet only has 24 letters, so that limits the names you can use. Second, stars can change brightness over time, wreaking havoc on the order of star names in a constellation.
A century later the English astronomer John Flamsteed came up with the idea of using numbers instead of letters, which avoids one of Bayer’s problems. Also, instead of sometimes using the changing brightness of the stars, he named them according to their position in a constellation, starting from the western edge of the constellation and moving towards the east. So, for example, 1 Orionis is not the brightest star in Orion, but the one closest to its western edge.
This also has problems. Constellation boundaries were not officially defined until the International Astronomical Union adopted them in 1928.so Flamsteed’s catalog occasionally listed stars in one constellation when they were in another. Furthermore, Flamsteed only cataloged the stars he could see from England, which excludes much of the southern sky that is invisible from that latitude.
Then there is the Bonner Durchmusterung catalog and its updates, created in the mid to late 1800s by astronomers at the Bonn Observatory in Germany. This was the last great catalog compiled before photography revolutionized astronomical observation. It covers the ninth magnitude stars, sorting them according to their declination (like latitude, but in the sky). After that, XX. Then came the Henry Draper catalog of the early 19th century, named after the American amateur astronomer and astrophotographer. The Draper catalog included spectroscopic information about the star, thus providing more details about the properties of the associated star (eg, temperature, size, and composition).
As telescopes and photographic equipment improved, fainter stars could be seen, meaning the catalogs became much larger. There were also more characteristics of the stars to consider, including their physical movements in relation to each other in the sky, which become apparent only after years of careful observation. All-sky surveys also became possible as larger telescopes were built in the Southern Hemisphere, creating the need for even bigger and better catalogs. In the 1990s, the numbers became astronomical. a project, Catalog of the United States Naval ObservatoryHe used observations made on thousands of glass plates in a wide area to organize a stunning a billion objects made from over three billion observations, listing stars as faint as magnitude 21 (a million times fainter than the dimmest star you can see with the naked eye).
When the Hubble Space Telescope was being built, astronomers realized that they needed a very precise list of star positions and brightnesses in order to aim properly. Catalog of Guiding Stars was formed, which today contains almost a billion stars. These are observed by Hubble’s special sensors, which then use the known positions of the stars to navigate where the telescope needs to be pointed.
There are still more catalogs, but the newest and most complete is local The topica European Space Agency mission to measure the brightness, positions, movements and colors of stars and other cosmic objects with incredible precision. The Gaia team releases a new data set every few years as updated measurements improve the star’s characteristics. The latest version contains new information about nearly two million stars in the Milky Way.
These more modern datasets (and there are too many to mention individually) contain so many stars that using any sort of designation is hopeless. Instead, they generally identify an object using an alphanumeric designation, combining the catalog name with the star’s position in the sky; so, for example, you might see a star listed as 2MASS J05551028+0724255. A two-micrometer all-sky surveyindicating the coordinates of 05 hours, 55 minutes and 10.28 seconds of direct ascension and 07 degrees, 24 minutes and 25.5 seconds of declination. Another name for that star? Betelgeuse
With the holidays and the usual gift-giving fast approaching, I can’t help but notice high-profile “star naming” companies highlighting their presence with multiple ad campaigns on social media and elsewhere. These promise you the ability to name a star (sometimes chosen by you, sometimes not) that will go into a catalog somewhere or be used by astronomers or – get this – stored in a vault. So elegant! To be very clear: this is nonsense. These are vanity sales, and no astronomer will ever know the star names bought from one of these companies or used by them. Many of these companies target grieving people to name a star after a loved one who has died, and I personally find those messages disgusting. Don’t fall for this terrible scam.
However, an unavoidable problem here is that any star can have many names, even sticking to legitimate ones. A a lot. Our old friend Betelgeuse, for example, It has less than 46 nominations listed at SIMBADa database of astronomical objects beyond the solar system. Of course, in that case everyone calls it “Betelgeuse” because it’s a popular name (and it’s funny to say), but the name used for other stars may depend on the observing astronomer, and how is observing A star may have been discovered in an infrared astronomical survey, but also independently in a radio wave observation, so different astronomers will call it different names depending on which part of the spectrum they are most familiar with.
But I’m fine with this; it gives us some flexibility with the naming, and it is not difficult which names go with which stars.
And of course, in the end, it would shine as sweetly as a star by any other name.
