Question: How many galaxies have names? How are galaxies named?

Roan Haggar answered on 10 Nov 2020:

There are billions of galaxies in our Universe, and so most of them don’t have names, simply because we haven’t had time to name them all yet!
—
Galaxies are named in several different ways. Some galaxies are named after people — for example, the Large Magellanic Cloud (which is one of the closest galaxies to us) is named after Ferdinand Magellan, who was one of the first Europeans to see it.
—
Others are named after things like Greek mythology (such as the Andromeda galaxy, which is found in the constellation of Andromeda in the sky), or just named because of how they look (like the Pinwheel galaxy, which has a nice spiral shape).
—
However, most galaxies have quite boring names. Because modern telescopes are so powerful, we have now discovered millions of galaxies, and it would be very time-consuming to give them all interesting names. For example, one of the most distant galaxies we know of is called MACS0647-JD. Here, ‘MACS’ refers to the name of the team that discovered the galaxy, ‘0647’ describes its position in the sky, and ‘JD’ describes how it was detected. It’s not as exciting as giving them fun names, but it’s useful for scientists! Hope this helps.