why do astronomers commonly name newly discovered planets and stars just strings of xharacters instead of actual words?
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There are far too many stars and other celestial objects for them all to be given proper names. When celestial objects are discovered, they’re cataloged so other people can find them and look up information about them. Different catalogues have different conventions for designation the objects, but they’re far more useful to astronomers than proper names.
They aren’t just strings of random numbers and letters, they’re unique identifiers based on how the objects are discovered and catalogued. For example, PSR J0737-3039 looks like random numbers and letters to you, but PSR tells me that it’s a pulsar and the numbers tell me its coordinates in the sky. This is obviously very useful for astronomers and astrophysicists. Objects generally have multiple designations in different catalogs so that astronomers know whether they are looking at an already known object or a newly discovered one.
And planets don’t have random strings of characters. Planet naming is extremely straightforward. For all planets outside our solar system, their names are simple the name or designation of the star followed by a lower case letter (starting with b) in the order that they were discovered. So Kepler-22b is the first planet discovered that orbits the star Kepler-22.
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