Twinkle, twinkle little scam

Originally published 19 December 1988

Some of you last-minute Christ­mas shop­pers may have received a solic­i­ta­tion from a com­pa­ny will­ing to sell you a star. For a fee of $35 the com­pa­ny (actu­al­ly, there are sev­er­al out­fits in this busi­ness) will name a star for the recip­i­ent of your gift. The name will be reg­is­tered in some­thing called the “Inter­na­tion­al Star Reg­istry,” per­haps with the promise that the list of names will sub­se­quent­ly be copy­right­ed by the Library of Congress.

Hav­ing a friend or loved one’s name attached to a star may seem a delight­ful gift, espe­cial­ly in this sea­son of stars and lights. But be fore­warned; these star-name schemes are scams, at least inso­far as they imply offi­cial recog­ni­tion for your star’s name.

The only star names with offi­cial sta­tus are those rec­og­nized by the Inter­na­tion­al Astro­nom­i­cal Union (IAU). Offi­cial star names are not for sale. As long ago as 1982, the IAU issued an advi­so­ry to mem­ber orga­ni­za­tions ask­ing them to alert the pub­lic to this clas­sic swin­dle. And the Library of Con­gress has repeat­ed­ly stressed that it has no con­nec­tion with any orga­ni­za­tion pur­port­ing to sell star names. Any implied sanc­tion by the Library is decep­tive and illegal.

No shortage of stock

But none of these warn­ings has stopped tens of thou­sands of peo­ple from buy­ing. Nor is there any short­age of stars for sale. There are more stars in the Milky Way Galaxy alone than there are human beings on this planet.

Of course, in order to name a star for a per­son you first must have a way to spec­i­fy the star. Astronomers iden­ti­fy stars by celes­tial coor­di­nates, right ascen­sion and dec­li­na­tion, anal­o­gous to lon­gi­tude and lat­i­tude on the sur­face of the Earth.

The star Betel­geuse, for exam­ple, has right ascen­sion 5 hours, 55 min­utes, 10.2 sec­onds and dec­li­na­tion 7 degrees, 24 min­utes, 26 sec­onds. In this way, every star in the sky can be iden­ti­fied by a unique set of num­bers, and every star with cat­a­logued coor­di­nates is poten­tial­ly for sale.

I have sev­er­al star cat­a­logues in my office. The cat­a­logue pre­pared by the Smith­son­ian Astro­phys­i­cal Obser­va­to­ry in Cam­bridge is most com­pre­hen­sive. Its four big vol­umes con­tain list­ings for more than 260,000 stars. Only a few hun­dred of these, such as Betel­geuse, have names of their own, exclu­sive of des­ig­na­tions by num­bers or Greek let­ters. That leaves enough unnamed stars to pro­vide a Christ­mas present for half the folks in Boston. At $35 bucks a pop that comes to some­thing near $10 mil­lion. Not a bad racket.

Of the named stars, some are named for peo­ple, usu­al­ly char­ac­ters of myth. The Gem­i­ni twins Cas­tor and Pol­lux are sons of Zeus and the mor­tal Leda. They are the broth­ers of Helen, whose face launched a thou­sand ships and start­ed the Tro­jan War. Cano­pus is the helms­man of King Menelaus, the hus­band of Helen. Alcy­one, Calaeno, Elec­tra, Maia, Merope, Sterope and Tayge­ta are the sev­en sis­ters of the Pleiades in Tau­rus. Their moth­er, Pleione, and father, Atlas, are nearby.

Only a few stars bear names of peo­ple who actu­al­ly lived. Cor Car­oli (“Heart of Charles,” in the con­stel­la­tion Canes Venati­ci, was named for Charles II of Eng­land, by Edmund Hal­ley of comet fame. The names Sualocin and Rotanev, two stars in the con­stel­la­tion Del­phi­nus, first appeared in the Paler­mo Cat­a­logue com­piled by the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi in 1814. The names puz­zled experts until some­one remem­bered that Piazzi had an assis­tant, Nic­co­lo Cac­cia­tore (in Latin, Nico­laus Vena­tor), whose names the astronomer reversed and applied to stars. NASA did some­thing of the same thing when it renamed a star Dno­ces in hon­or of astro­naut Edward H. White 2d, who died in the Apol­lo 1 fire.

How to go about it

If you want to get your name offi­cial­ly attached to a celes­tial object there are sev­er­al ways to go about it. One way is to make your­self famous enough in some field of sci­ence to have your name affixed to a new­ly dis­cov­ered fea­ture on the moon. Many lunar craters and oth­er for­ma­tions are named for his­tor­i­cal per­sons. The allo­ca­tion of new names to lunar fea­tures requires approval of the IAU. Names of per­sons still alive or polit­i­cal nom­i­na­tions are gen­er­al­ly excluded.

Or you could dis­cov­er your­self a comet. By pro­to­col, comets take the name of their dis­cov­er­er or dis­cov­er­ers. Jean-Louis Pons, an ear­ly 19-cen­tu­ry French astronomer, holds the all-time record with 37 comets to his cred­it, 22 of which bear his name alone. Retired Aus­tralian engi­neer William Brad­field has dis­cov­ered more comets visu­al­ly than any oth­er liv­ing person.

But none of this helps you com­plete your shop­ping list.

If you still want to give a star for Christ­mas, don’t send $35 to the com­pa­nies pur­port­ing to offer this ser­vice. Take the recip­i­ent of your intend­ed gift out under a dark Decem­ber sky. Ori­on is ris­ing in the East; Jupiter shines bright­ly near the Pleiades, as con­spic­u­ous as the Star of Christ­mas. Pick out any star you like and name it for your friend. I guar­an­tee your star’s name will be as exclu­sive and have the same lev­el of offi­cial sta­tus as those offered at a high price by the entrepreneurs.