Initially, from 2015 to 2018, WGSN collected star names that are in common use already. The main goal was approval of one (among many) spelling variants. It was a process accompanying the public IAU “NameExoWorlds”-Campaigns (NEWC). During this venture, the IAU was faced with a gap in standard nomenclature of stars and WGSN was established to deal with some conflicting suggestions of names from different cultures. As a consequence of the observed challenges and lack of profound collections (missing references, intentional or accidental spelling mistakes etc.), WGSN developed “Guidelines”, released in the Triennial Report 2018, and the strategy to reserve the stars brighter than 6.5 mag for traditional cultural names and leave only fainter stars for the NEWCs.
In 2022, the IAU OAO team that organized the third NEWC decided to ban naming stars after people. Due to several more requests in the same year and the foreseeable political explosiveness of such naming, we decided to avoid epoynomous star names from now on. Great people can be honored in the night sky by naming lunar craters or asteroids after them. Stars, however, should never bear official proper names of people.
Despite several mistakes that we spotted in the early name releases, we admitted that any change in the IAU-CSN would increase confusion. In 2023, we decided that we won’t change the released names but use our etymology website and our new “All Skies Encyclopaedia” (project start 2024, release 2025) to explain the mistake and the correct version.
Work Strategy (2024/25)
In the future, IAU WGSN naming will proceed according to the following strategy:
- We create a collection of names of historical and indigenous constellations, their celestial areas, and their etymologies.
- Stars that are visible to the naked eye (brighter 6.5 mag in V) will be given names of Indigenous or obsolete historical constellations or asterisms.
- Only stars fainter than Vmag=6.5 are considered for the suggestions from Naming Campaigns.
For the naming of naked-eye stars, we develop a scoring system and release the names after consensus within our group. To this end, the group has virtual monthly meetings and a (internally tracked, documented) mail discussion. The procedure to suggest a star name is, therefore:
- Creating an entry for the name in the encyclopaedia. There, all the spelling variants, identification variants / shifts over time, etymology and provenances are collected and references are given.
- When put on the discussion agenda, there needs to be a suggestion what star exactly is suggested to name with this name, why, and what alternatives might be possible.
- All group members are asked to read the ASE entry, double-check in their field of knowledge if there are any reasons to reject the suggestion (might that be due to an existing name in another culture that we don’t yet have in our collection, or due the name being offensive in some language/ culture).
- The group will discuss all potential problems and arguments, consider potential political issues to the best of their knowledge and as far as foreseeable.
- If there are other cultures which might have named the same star or asterism, we need to work out in balancing discussions based on the scoring system, what star gets what name. In some cases, this could be done in one meeting, in other cases, it may take half a year with more references consulted and many e-mails exchanged back and forth by some members or subgroup(s).
Guidelines (2018)
! In case of Indigenous names from living ethnic groups, these groups need to grant their permission for the use of their cultural heritage on a global scale. !
- Names should be pronounceable in some language.
- Names should be non-offensive.
- Names should not be too similar to an existing name of a star, planet, planetary satellite, or minor planet.
- Names of all individuals are prohibited for bright stars, except for rare cases with demonstrated historical precedence and widespread international diffusion. Contrived names are discouraged, except for rare cases with demonstrated historical precedence and widespread international diffusion.
- Names of events principally known for political or military activities are prohibited.
- Names of a purely or principally commercial nature are prohibited.
- Names of pet animals are prohibited.
- Acronyms, or names based on acronyms, are prohibited for proper names (acronyms could be confused with designations).
- Adopted names will follow The IAU Style Manual (Wilkins 1989). Proper names are transliterated to Latin alphabet, have an initial capitalized letter, and never contain numbers. Punctuation marks are discouraged. The names will be reported in Latin alphabet, but names may be quoted with original accents and diacritic marks where appropriate.
- The WGSN explicitly recognizes the names of exoplanets and their host stars approved by the EC WG Public Naming of Planets and Planetary Satellites (Montmerle et al. 2016).