The effect of modern sky chart software on star names

Abstract

New star names recently have been introduced in modern astronomy mobile applications, and in this paper we collect names that have appeared in the last 10 years in ten different applications. We search for the origins of these names, and find that some belong to Arabic, English, Latin, Chinese, Indian, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Roman and Turkish cultures, but many are of unknown origin. In this paper, we examine ten different astronomical software packages, and collect all new star names that have been entered on these since 2005. We then assemble a list of star names, and (where possible) include information on their language of origin and the associated software. We end this paper by trying to answer the question: “Who invented these new names?”