Question: If you discovered a new star, what would you name it?

Rosanna Tilbrook answered on 7 Mar 2019:

Unfortunately, when we name stars, we can’t pick our own name for them 🙁 We have to use a naming convention, so they’re named after the telescope that first saw them, and then given a number which depends on how many stars that telescope has found. The telescope I use is called NGTS (which stands for the Next Generation Transit Survey), and if it had found 10 stars so far, the next one would be called NGTS-11. Now say there was three planets around this star- they’d be called NGTS-11b, NGTS-11c and NGTS-11d (with NGTS-11b being the closest to the star and NGTS-11d being the furthest away). They don’t start from the letter ‘a’ as that’s taken to be the star. So the names are super boring, but they’re helpful for scientists!