Stellar Idea or Cosmic Scam?

By Frederic Golden

A star by any other name is not so sweet to astronomers

Television's Johnny Carson has one. So does Actor Richard Burton. Pop Singers Barry Manilow and Engelbert Humperdinck have two apiece. The Queen Mother got one as an 80th-birthday gift. Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales, received a pair when they were married. What do these luminaries have in common? Along with thousands of lesser mortals, each has had his or her name appended to at least one star--of the heavenly kind--in what seems to be the most far-out fad since astrology.

A personal star, twinkling in the night, there to gaze at and wish upon, guiding one's fortunes: it hardly seems possible. But it really is, at least according to an enterprising Toronto-based outfit called the International Star Registry. Founded by Canadian Advertising Man Ivor Downie, 44, the company will assign a name, any respectable name, including those of rock and royalty, to a star in any requested constellation for a $30 fee (credit cards accepted). As proof of the cosmic christening, the registry sends back a star-spangled certificate with the orb's new name inscribed on it, together with charts ocating it in the sky and assurances that the name will be locked up safely in a vault in Switzerland and kept on file forever in the Library of Congress. Says Phylis Mosele, 50, an affable mother of twelve who runs the registry's U.S. branch in Northfield, Ill., with her husband

John, 51: "It's a perfectly valid system."

Astronomers think otherwise. Some refer to the mail-order operation as "Stargate" and "Starscam." Says Swarthmore College Astronomer Wulff Heintz, without even the trace of a twinkle: "You could call it a fraud." What irritates professional stargazers is that the self-styled registry, which began in 1979 and "sold" more than 30,000 stars last year, is invading turf that has long been their special preserve. By astronomical tradition, only a few dozen of the brightest stars, such as Sirius, Vega, Betelgeuse and Aldebaran, are called by proper names, many of which derive from early Arab astronomy. The remainder are listed in various catalogues, drily and unromantically, by initials and numbers that tell astronomers such no-nonsense things as their position, type and magnitude (brightness).

The listings, to be sure, are a bit complicated. The same star sometimes receives a different designation in different catalogues. Currently, one of the most intriguing stars to astronomers is an object in the constellation Aquila (Eagle) that seems simultaneously to be hurtling toward and away from us. It is designated SS 433 because it was the 433rd object listed in a catalogue published a few years ago by Case Western Reserve Astronomers C. Bruce Stephenson and Nicholas Sanduleak. But it is also listed in a standard inventory of variable stars (whose light brightens and dims) as V1343 Aquilae. If the myriad catalogues are something of a hodgepodge, a semblance of order is maintained by the International Astronomical Union, the organization of the world's professional astronomers. The I.A.U. not only supervises star designations but also controls the labeling of planets, moons and other heavenly bodies that traditionally bear proper names suggested by their discoverers. Thanks to an extraordinarily successful decade of solar-system exploration, the I.A.U.'s naming committees have had to work overtime. They have approved names for hundreds of topographical features--craters, mountains, plains--on 18 planets and moons, as well as for three newly discovered moons of Jupiter (Adrastea, Thebe and Metis, all intimately connected with the king of gods in Greek mythology).

Astronomy is also turning to the classics for discoveries made during the unmanned Voyager spacecrafts' flybys of Saturn's moons. Craters on Mimas, for example, will be named for characters from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur; the recently photographed fissures on Enceladus, for those from the Arabian Nights; features on Tethys, for those from Homer's Odyssey. Yet even so seemingly innocuous a task can bog down in politics. The Soviets like to name newly discovered asteroids after revolutionary heroes. Last summer U.S. and West European astronomers countered by naming one after dissident Soviet Physicist Andrei Sakharov.

Professional astronomers are not above sentiment. Caltech's Charles Kowal, who has found scores of heavenly bodies, from supernovas to moonlets, christened one asteroid Napolitania, after Naples, Italy, his wife's home town. Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics called another Nancy, for his wife. Lowell Observatory's Edward Bowell, in what is admittedly a minority view, sees nothing wrong with someone seeking immortality by hitching his moniker to a star. After all, he says, "nobody owns the stars, do they?"

Even so, astronomers are sure to cold-shoulder the lists of any interloping organization like the International Star Registry. Says Swarthmore's Heintz, chairman of the I.A.U.'s commission for documentation: "There is no chance of the registry's designations being recognized by the world astronomical community." Besides, Marsden points out, many of the stars are so faint that "buyers probably won't even able to find their star." But Registry Founder Downie insists that the astronomers are missing the point. Says he: 'When space travel becomes as common as snowmobiling, it's going to be a lot more fun to go to Elton John and turn left at Sophia Loren than to go up to old 22 mark 109."

--By Frederic Golden. Reported by Philip Faflick/New York

With reporting by Philip Faflick

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