I was reading this article (https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34883/scie-discover-huge-extragalactic-structure-in-zone-of-avoidance) and it talks about how a new galaxy cluster is named “VVVGCl-B J181435-381432”
Does naming a galaxy cluster like this really help people in this field of study know what it is they’re talking about?
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Because space is too big. There are trillions of galaxies, and hundreds of billions of stars per galaxy. Even if we only uniquely identify a tiny fraction, that’s still hundreds of millions of stars, and there are only about ten thousand astronomers. There are better things to spend time on than constantly thinking up names and checking if they’ve already been taken.
Some stars do have names though, especially the brightest ones in the sky, which have been known since antiquity. Another way a star could get named is if there’s something that makes it particularly interesting.
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