Do Some Stars Possess A Particular Name?

[TheBiologist]

Apart from the sun, do any other stars have a name? Just curious.

 

[DaveC426913]

Certainly.

Rigel, Regulus, Betelguese...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proper_names_of_stars

Column 3 is an exhaustive list of star names.

 

[TheBiologist]

Certainly.

Rigel, Regulus, Betelguese...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proper_names_of_stars

Column 3 is an exhaustive list of star names.

Oh, thanks for that. :)

 

[Borek]

Jimmy is a nice name.

 

[Drakkith]

Jimmy is a nice name.

I prefer, "He who warms the land". Followed closely by, "BrightPointyThing".

 

[SteamKing]

I thought everybody knew Polaris, AKA the Pole Star.

 

[Astronuc]

Apart from the sun, do any other stars have a name? Just curious.

Stars have different names in different languages. The names are given the observers, but outside of our terrestrial cultures, there is no significance. Certainly not beyond our atmosphere that we know of.

Complementing the Wikipedia list posted by DaveC - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arabic_star_names
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_star_names

There are Latin and Greek names, Scandanavian and Germanic names, and names given by early indigenous peoples in the northern and southern hemispheres.

 

[SteamKing]

Before it was a satellite radio, Sirius was also known as the Dog Star, the brightest star in the sky except for the sun.

Before it was a crappy Chevy, Vega was a star in the constellation Lyra.

Before is was a movie (Beetlejuice), Betelguese was one of the largest stars known. If Betelguese were placed in the same spot as the sun, its surface would extend almost to Jupiter.

 

[lpetrich]

Sirius - Wikipedia has numerous names, as most of the brighter stars do.

Traditional names, like "Sirius" itself. Many traditional names are part-of-constellation names. Like these Arabic ones that one can find in several Arabic star names: Ras = head, Rigel = foot, Deneb = tail.

Early modern star cataloguers Johann Bayer and John Flamsteed also used in-constellation names. Bayer: Alpha = brightest, beta = second brightest, etc. Flamsteed: 1 = westmost, 2 = next eastward, ...

Most more recent star cataloguers dispense with constellations outright, using a super Flamsteed approach of numbers only.

 

[Firedog89]

Alpha Centauri, Betelguise