For those contemplating giving a loved one the ultimate Christmas gift -- having a star named after him or her -- think twice, says University of Colorado at Boulder astronomy Professor Ted Snow.
Snow, a professor in the astrophysical and planetary sciences department, said several private companies are offering the public a chance to pick a star and have it named after themselves, a friend or relative for fees ranging from $35 to $100. Some companies advertise that the star with the name the buyer has chosen will be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, implying that it will be protected from being named for anyone else, he said.
But most of the 10,000 “bright” stars -- those that can be viewed from Earth with the naked eye -- already have names used by astronomers that are based on agreements made by an organization of professional astronomers called the International Astronomical Union, said Snow. And although these are viewed as conventional references rather than legally binding names, they are the closest thing to official names the stars will ever have.
“Anyone can declare that a particular star is named for himself or herself, but this does not mean that anyone else will ever use that name or that the name is somehow reserved,” said Snow. There is no way the U.S. Copyright Office can protect, reserve or register the names of stars, he said.
“That is the crux of the scam being perpetrated by some of these star- naming companies, because they imply otherwise,“ said Snow. “They really offer nothing more than a very expensive certificate that a person could make himself or herself with just as much validity.”
Such companies create false impressions that the star names have some kind of official status, when in fact the only place the stars will even be listed is in a book that will be published by the company. “This book will be offered for sale, prying even more money out of those who have already paid a substantial sum to have stars named for themselves,” he said.
One particular company claims to have already registered “hundreds of thousands of stars,” said Snow. If that is the case, the vast majority of stars registered are too dim to be seen with the naked eye, since less than 10,000 stars are visible from the Northern Hemisphere.
“Therefore most of their customers cannot point out their actual stars in the sky, because they can’t be seen without a substantial telescope,” he said. “But how appealing would it be if the ads said you could name a star for yourself, but that unfortunately it was too faint for anyone to ever see?”
In itself, the practice is probably not illegal, said Snow. “But it is highly deceptive, and it is likely that many people have spent money based on false assumptions fostered by deliberately incomplete information.”
The former director of ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉäÂ’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, Snow is a science team member on the $25 million Cosmic Origins Spectrometer that is being designed and built jointly by ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä-Boulder and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder for installation on Hubble in 2002.
He also is a science team member on the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, an orbiting telescope that will carry a $9 million ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä-Boulder instrument into space in 1998. Snow and CASA Research Associate Kenneth Brownsberger co-authored “Universe: Origins and Evolution,” a general astronomy textbook published in 1997 by Wadsworth Publishing Co. of Belmont, Calif.