The Problem
The universe is not getting smaller. Every year our instruments push deeper into the dark and return with millions of new detections. By the time a child born today reaches adulthood, the number of cataloged celestial objects will likely exceed a billion.
The International Astronomical Union names a fraction of what we find — the famous, the mythic, the lucky. The rest receive a catalog number. HD 189733. NGC 4889. PSR B0531+21. These are addresses, not names. They tell you where something is. They say nothing about what it is.
We think that is worth changing.
The Solution
CORE — the Celestial Object Renaming Engine — assigns a proper, personal name to every unnamed object in our databases. Stars, galaxies, pulsars, exoplanets, comets, nebulae, and more. Each name is drawn from archetype pools tuned to the object's own characteristics: its spectral class, its morphology, its luminosity, its story.
The process is deterministic — run the same object through the engine a thousand times and it returns the same name. That name belongs to that object. It is not random. It is not arbitrary. It follows the same logic a poet uses when trying to find the word that was always already there.
And because names change how we relate to things, each one comes with a reason — a short paragraph that explains why this particular word fits this particular star.