*THE WANDERING ASTRONOMER*

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Stars For Sale?


Although the Daily Astronomer has passed into the ages, we've kept
Pandora's Jar, the dust-encoated repository of astronomical queries.
Today we removed a parchment imprinted with the following question:

*"Have people actually bought things like stars and planets in space?"*

-V.T.


The wording of your question is, itself, quite insightful. No, nobody has
ACTUALLY ‘bought’ any celestial object, be it star, planet or moon.
However, some clever and admittedly unscrupulous businesses have earned a
tidy profit by peddling these remote objects that nobody can truly own.

As one wit -whose name I have unfortunately forgotten- said in reference to
‘selling stars,’

“Isn’t it lovely and ironic that selling stars gives a merchant billions of
products with no ‘overhead.’”

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is the institution charged with
assigning names to celestial objects. Most of the properly named stars were
so named long before the establishment of the IAU (1919). The IAU merely
retained these names. Also, many asteroids are named for eminent scientists
and other celebrities:

   - *1996 Adams and 1997 Leverrier *(co-discovers of Neptune)
   - *7672 Hawking* (the brilliant Stephen)
   - *2675 Tolkien* (the divine JRR
   - *7909 Ziffer* (named for University of Southern Maine's Dr. Julie
   Ziffer who was part of the research team that discovered water ice on the
   asteroid 24 Themis.  Neat scientific phenomenon:  Say '7909 Ziffer' in even
   a conversational tone and seismographs will be set off in the otherwise
   geologically quiescent town of Orono)


and many others have been so honored. However, these people never ‘owned’
the asteroids. Asteroids were merely named for them.

In reference to the practise of ‘buying stars and other celestial objects,”
the IAU posted the following statement:

“As an international scientific organisation, the IAU dissociates itself
entirely from the commercial practice of "selling" fictitious star names,
surface feature names, or real estate on other planets or moons in the
Solar System. Accordingly, the IAU does not maintain a list of the (several
competing) businesses across the globe which claim to do so. Readers
wanting to contact such enterprises, despite the explanations given below,
should search commercial directories in their country of origin.”

The “International Star Registry” is perhaps the most well known entity
which ‘sells’ stars. This registry merely places a person’s name by the
star in a compilation that it eventually registers with the US Copyright
Office. It all sounds quite official. However, it means nothing at all.

I have encountered many children and adults who, while visiting the
planetarium, want me to show them the star they ‘received’ for their
birthday. Because the star’s coordinates are given, I can point out the
general area. However, these stars are always well beyond the range of
naked eye visibility and so will not appear in a planetarium simulation.
While it may be contrary to my professional ‘ethics,’ -whatever that means-
I never explain that the star purchase was fraudulent as the purchaser is
almost invariably a well meaning friend or relation of the recipient.

All the same, we should all know that the empyreal orbs shall never be for
sale…at least not to us mortals.

I hope this answer proves helpful.