• Question: why do stars have names

    Asked by anon-210530 to Hannah on 6 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Hannah Dalgleish

      Hannah Dalgleish answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Only a few stars have names i.e. the ones we can see with the naked eye like Polaris, Sirius, Betelgeuse, etc. It was probably useful to know the names of the stars because if they could recognise them and see where they were at different times of year they knew when to plant certain crops or how to navigate the oceans.

      But in all, there are billions upon billions of stars in the universe, far too many to name them all.

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