Can you really buy a star?

The short answer: no. No international text recognises private ownership of a celestial object, and no company can have a star name registered with the body that actually names them. What star naming sites sell is an entry in their own database, together with a certificate. That is not nothing, but it is not what the wording suggests.

This page sets out what is true, what is false, and what is merely vague. We sell a celestial gift ourselves, so we apply the same test to our own offer at the end.

What the law actually says, and what it is made to say

You will often read that "the Outer Space Treaty makes it illegal to buy a star". It is a convenient sentence, and it is inaccurate. Here is Article II, in its original wording:

"Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."

The decisive word is national. The treaty, in force since 1967 and ratified by more than a hundred states, addresses states: it forbids them from planting a flag and inferring sovereignty from it. The phrase "or by any other means", often quoted on its own, attaches to that same national appropriation. The text says nothing about private individuals.

Does that mean a private person can buy a star after all? No, and this is where the nuance matters: no international text recognises private ownership of a celestial object either. There is no explicit prohibition; there is an absence of any basis. Such a sale is not illegal in the sense of being punishable. It is simply without object. What does change in nature is letting a buyer believe it produces an official effect.

Who names stars, and by what procedure

One institution assigns names to celestial objects: the International Astronomical Union. It brings together professional astronomers worldwide and is, in its own words, recognised as the authority on naming celestial bodies. The work is handled by dedicated groups, among them the Working Group on Star Names, which weighs proposals and publishes the names that are adopted.

Two consequences that commercial pages rarely mention. First, a name approved by the IAU is the one scientists, space agencies and authors then use: that is what recognition means, and you can observe it in the literature. Second, the overwhelming majority of stars have no name at all, only a catalogue designation made of letters and numbers. A star "named" by a commercial registry therefore keeps its catalogue designation, and only that, in every database astronomers consult.

That is where the confusion starts, and it is worth pausing on: a designationand a name are two different things. Vega, for instance, has both: a proper name, inherited from Arabic and centuries old, and designations, among them Alpha Lyrae. Almost every star has only the second. A commercial registry adds neither: it adds a line to its own file, next to a designation that already existed and does not move.

And the simplest point of all: the IAU sells nothing. No sum, paid to anyone, opens a naming file.

So what is actually being sold?

A line in a private database, and a document attesting to it. The seller keeps the file, associates a name with a set of coordinates, and hands you the proof. Put that way, there is no problem at all: it is a gesture, and a gesture can be worth a great deal.

The vagueness starts with the vocabulary. "International registry", "official certificate", "registered", "certified": these words imply an outside authority that does not exist. A private register binds only the company that keeps it, and nothing stops two companies from assigning two different names to the same star, or one company from closing its doors one day with its file.

You will also meet the deposit argument: the register has been lodged with a public officer, published as a book, or filed with an institution. Those steps exist and are not fraudulent, but all they establish is that a document was handed over on a given date. Depositing a telephone directory makes neither its numbers nor its names official. The formality covers the container, never the contents.

The word the International Astronomical Union uses

The IAU has published a position on this practice. It is short and unambiguous: such names have "no formal or official validity whatsoever". It is hard to be clearer, and it is the authority itself speaking.

The rest deserves reading, because it is quoted far less often and is much more interesting. The IAU does not condemn the gesture, nor the feeling behind it. It closes by observing that "the beauty of the night sky is not for sale", and that it is free for everyone to enjoy. What it objects to is not the dedication. It is charging for an officialdom that does not exist.

The only names ever slipped into the sky cost nothing

There is one famous exception, and it is worth telling because it says everything. Two stars in Delphinus are called Sualocin and Rotanev. The names first appear in the Palermo star catalogue, published in 1814, and for decades nobody could work out what they meant.

The riddle was eventually solved: read them backwards. You get Nicolaus Venator, the Latin form of the name of Niccolò Cacciatore, assistant to the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi at the Palermo observatory. He had quietly slipped his own name into the sky, reversed, while preparing the catalogue.

Both names are still in use today, two centuries later. It is probably the only time anyone has managed to get their own name into the star catalogues without being entitled to, and it cost nobody a penny. The moral is not that you should imitate Cacciatore. It is that no sum of money, today, buys what he obtained with a joke.

What it changes for the person receiving it

That is the question nobody thinks to ask, and it is the only one that matters on the day you give the gift. The disappointments reported around these presents almost never come from the purchase. They come from the discovery, months later, usually from someone else who explains in three sentences that none of it was official. The gift does not lose its beauty that day. The person who gave it feels foolish.

Two other surprises recur. The star assigned is usually far too faint to be seen with the naked eye, which makes the very gesture you pictured impossible: pointing at it. And uniqueness is guaranteed only within the seller's file, not in the sky, where nothing prevents another registry from having assigned the same star already.

How to recognise an honest seller

Four questions are enough, and they apply to any site, including this one.

• Where does it say that the name is recognised by no astronomical authority? If the answer sits at question twenty of an FAQ, or at the end of the terms, that is an answer in itself.
• Is it written where the recipient will actually read it, on the page they open, or only on the site that only the buyer visits?
• Does the seller commit to never assigning the same thing twice, and does it say plainly that this commitment holds only within its own register?
• Is the publisher identifiable: a company name, an address, a way to reach a human being? A brand that sounds institutional is not an identity.

One further signal: the images. An archive photograph with a credit you can trace back costs nothing to check, and says a good deal about everything else.

What we do, and what we do not do

We sell a celestial gift, so the test above applies to us. With Eonelya youacquire shares of a fragment of a nebula, recorded in a name in our private register, with a personalized certificate and a gift page. It confers no ownership of any celestial object, no astronomical organisation recognises it, and we have no link to NASA, ESA or the ESO beyond the use of their public archive photographs, with credits shown.

That sentence is printed on the certificate, not only here. It is the only difference we claim, and it comes down to one idea: nobody should discover anything unpleasant six months from now. The rest is real regions of the sky, photographed by the greatest telescopes, from €2.90 per share in the collection, and a page that explainswhat you really give.

Sources: Outer Space Treaty, Article II (UN, 1967) ·International Astronomical Union, "Buying star names".