We open this section to the number of people who ask us about the possibility of ” naming a star ” (or asteroid, planet, etc).
There are some private companies and websites that seem to do this.
But no private company is empowered to name stars . Neither NASA , nor the space agency of any country, with which some of these companies claim to be related, has such powers.
The body that regulates the nomenclature of the stars is the International Astronomical Union ( www.iau.org(link is external)), according to certain rules, for example:
- The stars will not generally be able to take names of people; only catalog numbers or references (except those that have historically Arabic, Latin names, etc.).
- The geographical accidents of other planets and satellites of the Solar Systemmay take names of illustrious figures of Science, Culture or History (already deceased).
- In some cases, a star and / or its exoplanetsmay also be named after illustrious characters (for example, the recently named Estrella Cervantes(link is external)), but it is done by well-regulated procedures.
- ..
The only cases in which we can aspire to inscribe our name or that of another person in the sky, are the following:
- Comets that are discoveredwill bear the surname of their discoverer.
- The asteroids that are discoveredwill bear the name that their discoverer decides (with certain restrictions).
And of course in these cases the IAU does not charge for assigning names .
The IAU states on its website its total dissociation from these commercial practices(link is external).
Our purpose here is to inform , so that the readers of this website, if they still decide to “put their name to a star”, do so knowingly, as many people have spent their money being misinformed on this subject.
“Selling names of stars” can be compared to “selling plots on the Moon”, which years ago was also fashionable.
Certificates sent to us by companies “that sell stars” may be eye-catching, but they will not be recognized by anyone other than themselves. They will also send us a celestial map in which the star appears with our name, but this name will not appear anywhere else , it will not be registered in any stellar catalog , it will not appear in textbooks, no one, neither professionals nor amateurs , will know to that star by our name. The star already has its catalog number and this is how it will appear on all astronomical maps.
Let us also bear in mind that, since it is not regulated or has any validity, we can expect anything, such as that this company can sell “our” same star to another person again, or that different companies sell the same star to different people. On the other hand, what they assign us is always a very faint star, not even visible to the naked eye, and which would be difficult to identify with a telescope.
So if you want a certificate, grab your computer and your printer, and imaginatively make one yourself . Choose the star that you like the most, for example the Polar, or the Sun, and dedicate it to yourself or the person you want. It will have exactly the same value and you will not have to pay anything.
