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Originally Posted by tony873004
You know, or you assume? Since you claim to know, can you provide a reference for this? How many star names have been sold by all the companies combined? How many stars of magnitude 10 or brighter are there?
By the way, I could be wrong. I don't know these answers either. I do have a good estimate on the number of stars mag 10 and brighter, and it seems too high to me for them to ever run out of stars unless this name selling business really caught on.
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I know.
I have had people bring 12th magnitude stars to our observatory that they had "purchased".
There are only about 600,000 stars of 10th magnitude or brighter. (edited number because I read the able wrong).
I know that there are multiple companies that sell stars, but I do not know how many have been sold. In a different message I think you stated that ISR had sold more than a million. I suspect that some of their competitors have sold similar numbers, but even if they had sold only half as many then all the stars of 10th mag and brighter would have already been sold multiple times.
I have heard stories about even dimmer stars being "sold", down to 14th magnitude. And some of them were not even real stars.
Clearly, they sold all the stars on common star charts like Sky Atlas 2000 (which goes down to mag 8.5 if I remember correctly) a long time ago.
Actually, there is nothing to prevent ISR from selling the same star to more than one person. I do not know if they have done that yet, but I don't think their adverts say anything that would prevent them from doing that.
Edited to add quote from IAU:
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The name you paid for can be ignored, forgotten, or sold again to anyone else by anyone at any time.
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