Stars named after people

Openly named stars

There is a small group of stars whose common names honour individuals. Many of these were highly significant in some way when discovered, usually through having some unusual characteristic.

• Argelander's Star is Groombridge 1830, a high proper motion star. Named for Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander, who discovered its high proper motion in 1842.
• Argelander's second star is Lalande 21185, a nearby red dwarf star. Named also for Argelander, who discovered its high proper motion in 1857.
• Bessel's Star is 61 Cygni, for a short time the nearest star whose distance was accurately known (measured by Friedrich Bessel in 1838). Also called Piazzi's Flying Star, since Giuseppe Piazzi nominated it as a good candidate for distance measurements (parallaxes).
• Boyajian's Star (or Tabby's Star) is KIC 8462852, an F-type main-sequence star with a highly unusual light curve in the constellation of Cygnus, named after Tabetha S. Boyajian; its peculiar characteristics engendered speculation that a Dyson sphere of an extraterrestrial civilization had been discovered.
• Caffau's Star is an ultra-metal-poor halo star named after the astronomer Elisabetta Caffau.
• Cayrel's Star is an ultra-metal-poor halo star named after the French astronomer Roger Cayrel.
• Herschel's Garnet Star is Mu Cephei, a red supergiant particularly remarkable for its deep red color, first described by William Herschel.
• Hind's Crimson Star is R Leporis, a long-period variable star, named after the discoverer John Russell Hind. It is one of the reddest stars visible.
• Innes' star, better known as LHS 40,^[10] is a high proper-motion star named after the discoverer of Proxima Centauri. In 1930 Luyten listed this as the fifth-closest star system, but his belief was mistaken as it turned out to be 41 light-years away.
• Kapteyn's Star, a subdwarf, was discovered in 1897 by Jacobus Kapteyn, the star with the highest known proper motion at the time of its discovery.
• Kepler's Star, name given to the supernova later designated SN 1604 when first observed, after Johannes Kepler, who studied it extensively though he did not have priority of discovery.
• Krzeminski's Star is a blue supergiant, part of the pulsar Centaurus X-3, discovered by the Polish astronomer Wojciech Krzemiński in 1974.
• Luyten's Star, another red dwarf, is named after Willem Jacob Luyten, its discoverer.
• Piazzi's Flying Star, see Bessel's Star.
• Plaskett's Star (also designated HR 2422) is one of the most massive binary stars known, with a total mass of about one hundred times that of the Sun. It is named after John Stanley Plaskett, the Canadian astronomer who discovered its binary nature in 1922.
• Przybylski's Star (also designated HD 101065) is a star that shows unusually high abundance of lanthanide elements in its spectral lines, named for Antoni Przybylski.
• Sakurai's Object (also designated V4334 Sgr) is an unusual red giant, named after Yukio Sakurai.
• Sidus Ludoviciana, an 8th-magnitude star in the asterism of the Big Dipper in the constellation Ursa Major, halfway between Mizar and Alcor. It was discovered on 2 December 1722 by Johann Georg Liebknecht, who mistook it for a planet and named it after Louis V, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt.
• Scholz's star is a late-M dwarf + T-type brown dwarf (M9.5 + T5) system, discovered in 2013 by Ralf-Dieter Scholz. It has large parallax, but relatively small proper motion, and it is known for its close flyby to the Sun about 70,000 years ago.
• Sneden's Star is a giant star, named after Chris Sneden. The star is known for its high-resolution spectroscopic observations.
• Tabby's Star, see Boyajian's Star.
• Teegarden's star, a nearby star discovered in 2003 in archived data taken years earlier for NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program. The star is named in honor of Bonnard J. Teegarden, the NASA astrophysicist that led the discovery team.
• Tycho's Star, name given to the supernova later designated SN 1572, after Tycho Brahe, though he did not have priority of discovery.
• Van Biesbroeck's Star is VB 10, a very small, faint, red dwarf named after George Van Biesbroeck, who discovered it in 1944 – the smallest and faintest star then known.
• Van Maanen's Star is a white dwarf, discovered in 1917 by Adriaan van Maanen, only the second white dwarf discovered.

(Note that Pandora's Star and Ratner's Star are the names of novels, not actual stars.)

Covertly named stars

Some stars were given names that were disguised names of individuals, which names subsequently appeared in star catalogues and thus into more general usage.

The earliest noted example was Sualocin and Rotanev, which names have now been approved by the IAU WGSN (see above). More recently, during the Apollo program, it was common for astronauts to be trained in celestial navigation, and to use a list of naked-eye stars which to take bearings. As a practical joke, Gus Grissom gave names to three stars on this list, which were references to the three Apollo 1 crew:

• Navi for the star Gamma Cassiopeiae and which is Ivan spelled backwards, the middle name of Virgil Ivan "Gus" Grissom.
• Dnoces for the star Iota Ursae Majoris and which is Second spelled backwards, alluding to Edward Higgins White, II.
• Regor for the star Gamma Velorum and which is Roger spelled backwards, the first name of Roger Bruce Chaffee.

The names stuck, perhaps in memoriam for their deaths in the Apollo 1 fire, and were used through the rest of the program. Unknown to Grissom, these stars already had traditional names; however, those were not generally used, allowing the three new names to make their way into other records. Today, they are generally considered disused—some sources listing them as "traditional".

It is possible, though unlikely, that further traditional names are in fact hidden names such as these, not yet identified; etymologies for many star names are not currently known.

Commercial naming

Whilst many private companies will offer the "right" to name a star, for a fee, they have no legal standing to assign any star a name, and can offer no guarantee of the name being noted. The IAU does not recognize this practice and its website uses the word charlatanry in this context.^[11]