BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy ABC of Astronomy – B Is for Bok Globule

B is for Bok globule, a kind of dark nebula studied by Bart Bok. B is for Bayer who invented a handy system of star designations beginning with a Greek letter. And B is for Baily's beads. You won't find them in a jewelry shop, but you might see them in a solar eclipse, as Francis Baily did.

ABC of Astronomy – B Is for Bok Globule

Asteroid 1983 Bok was named for both Bart Bok and his wife Priscilla Fairfield, also an astronomer. They both devoted a lot of time to public outreach and popularizing astronomy. The Boston Globe described them as "the salesmen of the Milky Way". When the asteroid was named, Bart Bok thanked the International Astronomical Union for this "little plot of land that I can retire to and live on."

Baily's beads are apparently best seen during an annular eclipse. I can't really comment on that from personal experience. I did see a total eclipse once and I didn't see Baily's beads, which are bits of sunlight along one edge of the eclipsed Sun.

Johann Bayer invented the system for naming stars in a constellation using a Greek letter + the Latin possessive form of the constellation. Before that, the stars in a star atlas tended not to have designations, just descriptions of where they were in the constellation. Bayer invented this system over four hundred years ago.

Today people still commonly use Bayer's names, but there are also other names - many of them from Arabic - for the brighter ones. But we aren't consistent. For example, the brightest star as seen from Earth is Sirius. I rarely see it called Alpha Canis Majoris. But what about the third brightest star, Rigil Kentaurus? You're more likely to know it as Alpha Centauri.