Most people have heard of the companies that sell you the ability to name a star. Well, they’re shams. You pay a hefty sum (around $55 here), and they choose a star, sure, and send you the coordinates of it, and give it your chosen name — in an inconsequential catalog that they’ve created for this purpose (i.e., the “Your Place in the Cosmos astronomical compendium”).

If you really want your name in the cosmos, you’ve got to convince the International Astronomical Union (IAU). And sorry, but a star’s out of the question. As Samuel Arbesman writes in the Boston Globe:

No one names stars anymore. A new star, when it’s discovered, just gets tagged with a dull collection of letters and numbers. There are hundreds of millions of stars, and astronomers need a systematic way to find them, so they long ago stopped giving them individual names.

Arbesman’s article tells the story of his quest to name a celestial object after someone he admired: famed sports journalist George Plimpton. It turns out that the IAU has some funny/ridiculous naming rules (asteroids that orbit with Jupiter must be named after Trojan War warriors, for example, whereas the moons of Uranus take the names of Shakespearean characters). Read the whole piece to see if Arbesman succeeded.