Why No Star Naming Certificate Is Ever Official and Only the IAU Gets to Name a Star in the Sky

The package arrives looking convincing: a glossy certificate, a sky chart with a red circle around a faint point of light, sometimes a plaque. A website called something like StarRegistry or NameAStar has taken your money, anywhere from five hundred to several thousand rupees, and issued you a document declaring that a star now bears the name you chose. Astronomers at observatories around the world have no record of this. They never will. The International Astronomical Union, the only body with the authority to officially name objects in the sky, does not recognise these certificates. It never has. The star you "named" has a catalogue designation, a string of letters and numbers assigned by a telescope survey, and that is what every professional in astronomy calls it.
The commercial star naming industry is not illegal. It sells novelty, and novelty has value. But the certificates carry a specific implied promise, that the name is official, that it will persist, that astronomers will use it, and that promise is false.
The International Astronomical Union was founded in 1919 and is headquartered in Paris. It is the body that, among other things, reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006. Its Working Group on Star Names, established in 2016, is the committee responsible for assigning proper names to individual stars. As of the group's most recent published catalogue, the IAU has approved proper names for just over 400 stars out of the estimated 100 billion stars in the Milky Way alone. Most of those names are ancient: Sirius, Vega, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Aldebaran. Many come from Arabic, Greek, or Latin astronomical traditions. A smaller number come from other cultures, the IAU has in recent years worked to incorporate names from Polynesian, Chinese, and indigenous traditions.
The process for adding a new name is not quick. A proposal goes to the Working Group, which evaluates historical usage, cultural significance, and whether the name is already in use for another object. Approved names are published in the IAU's official catalogue, the IAU Catalog of Star Names. No individual, company, or government can submit a name for a fee and have it approved. The IAU has stated this explicitly on its website: "Such certificates are not recognised by the IAU or by any scientific organisation. Stars are only named by the IAU."

Every star visible to the naked eye, and millions more visible only through telescopes, already has at least one designation. The bright stars have proper names from the IAU catalogue. The rest are identified by catalogue number. The Henry Draper Catalogue, compiled in the early twentieth century, assigned HD numbers to over 225,000 stars. The Hipparcos mission, a European Space Agency satellite that ran from 1989 to 1993, produced a catalogue of about 118,000 stars with precise positions, each with an HIP number. The Gaia mission, also from ESA and still producing data, has catalogued over one billion stellar objects with extraordinary precision.
When a commercial registry tells you that your chosen name will be "recorded in their database," that database is private, maintained by the company, and consulted by nobody outside it. The star itself continues to be called HD 189733, or HIP 98298, or Gaia DR3 something-or-other, depending on which survey is relevant to the research at hand. The name on your certificate does not appear in any telescope's pointing software, any published paper, or any sky atlas used by astronomers.

The IAU's position is not bureaucratic stubbornness. Astronomy depends on a shared, stable naming system. When a researcher in Pune, another in Chile, and a third in Japan are all looking at the same star, they need to be certain they are looking at the same object. That certainty comes from catalogue designations and the IAU's approved proper names, not from a registry that has sold the same star's naming rights to three different buyers in three different countries, which has happened.
Commercial registries have no mechanism to prevent duplicate sales. Two families could each hold a certificate for the same star with different names. Neither name is official. Neither family has any recourse, because the product was never what it appeared to be.

ISRO's missions, Chandrayaan-3, which landed near the lunar south pole in August 2023, and Mangalyaan, which reached Martian orbit in 2014, generate data that references objects by their catalogue designations. Gaganyaan, India's crewed spaceflight programme, will train astronauts to navigate using those same designations. No Indian space mission has ever used a commercially purchased star name, and none will.
A star naming certificate is a memento. It is a printed object that marks a moment, a birth, a death, a marriage, a friendship. That is a real thing to sell, and for many buyers it is enough. The grief of a parent who names a star after a child they lost, or the warmth of a couple who choose a star for an anniversary, is genuine. The certificate holds that feeling. It just does not hold any astronomical authority.
The honest version of these products would say exactly that: this is a keepsake, not a registration. A handful of companies now include disclaimers to this effect. Most do not, because the implied officialness is what sells the product.
The star is real. The light reaching your eye left its source decades or centuries ago. The constellation it sits in, whether that is Orion, Scorpius, or Sagittarius, has a name the IAU recognises, drawn from traditions that predate the printing press. The star itself, if it has a proper name at all, got that name through a process involving cultural history and scientific consensus. What it did not get is a name from a website with a shopping cart.
The distance between a certificate and a catalogue entry is not a technicality. It is the difference between a story you tell yourself and a fact that holds when someone checks.