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In 2016, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) [2] to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN's first bulletin, dated July 2016, [3] included a table of 125 stars comprising the first two batches of names approved by the WGSN (on 30 June and 20 July 2016) together with names of stars adopted by the IAU Executive Committee ...
Astronomical naming conventions. Appearance. In ancient times, only the Sun and Moon, a few stars, and the most easily visible planets had names. Over the last few hundred years, the number of identified astronomical objects has risen from hundreds to over a billion, and more are discovered every year. Astronomers need to be able to assign ...
In astronomy, star names, in contrast to star designations, are proper names of stars that have emerged from usage in pre-modern astronomical traditions. Lists of these names appear in the following articles: List of Arabic star names. List of Chinese star names. List of proper names of stars: traditional proper names in modern usage around ...
The Bright Star Catalogue, which is a star catalogue listing all stars of apparent magnitude 6.5 or brighter, or roughly every star visible to the naked eye from Earth, contains 9,096 stars. [1] The most voluminous modern catalogues list on the order of a billion stars, out of an estimated total of 200 to 400 billion in the Milky Way .
Galaxy Constellation Origin of name Notes Andromeda Galaxy: Andromeda: Andromeda, which is shortened from "Andromeda Galaxy", gets its name from the area of the sky in which it appears, the constellation of Andromeda. Andromeda is the closest big galaxy to the Milky Way and is expected to collide with the Milky Way around 4.5 billion years from ...
Name based on the brightest galaxy in the group when that name is commonly used for identification (e.g. the M81 Group); this is only applicable to groups of galaxies within approximately 50 Mpc; The most commonly-used catalog number (e.g. Abell 3266) Note that group and cluster names are proper nouns.
Named for its size, El Gordo ("the fat one") is the biggest cluster found in the distant universe (at its distance and beyond), at the time of discovery in 2011, with a mass of 3 quadrillion suns. The second most massive galaxy cluster next to El Gordo is RCS2 J2327, a galaxy cluster with the mass of 2 quadrillion suns.
Below are lists of the largest stars currently known, ordered by radius and separated into categories by galaxy. The unit of measurement used is the radius of the Sun (approximately 695,700 km ; 432,300 mi ).