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kym thalassoudis / skymaps.com; background: national aeronatics and space administration (nasa)
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Scholars have identified 210 visible stars that carry Arabic names, some of which preserve older names that date back to Babylon and Sumeria. In this illustration, the 30 brightest stars with Arabic names appear as eight-pointed stars, in sizes adjusted for their relative magnitudes, or brightnesses.
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On March 3, 1995, when American astronomers Andrea Dupree and Ronald Gilliland trained the orbiting Hubble Telescope on the constellation of Orion the Hunter, they captured a historic photograph: the first-ever direct image of the disk of a star other than the Sun.
ntil then, star photographs had shown only points of light, but Dupree and Gilliland produced an image large enough to give the star a shape. The center of the bright orange image showed a mysterious hot spot twice the diameter of the Earth’s orbit, surrounded by an ultraviolet atmosphere that emits prodigious amounts of radiation.
The star was Betelgeuse, one of the most famous of the red supergiants and the second brightest star in Orion.
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roland laffitte, Héritage arabe: des noms arabes pour les étoiles (Paris, 2006).
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| The odd name of Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion, comes from an Arabic original whose first letter was inadvertantly changed by a 13th-century astronomer. Second brightest in Orion, the star that was originally named in Arabic yad al-jawza’ appears (top) at the upper left, and above, in an antique-style rendition, at the end of the sleeve of the hunter’s tunic. |
Betelgeuse (pronounced beetle-jooz or sometimes bet-el-juice) is an odd name—but then most of the common star names sound strange to the western ear. The reason is that most of them are of Arabic origin: Aldebaran (“The Follower”), Algol (“The Ghoul”), Arrakis (“The Dancer”), Deneb (“Tail”), Fomalhaut (“The Fish’s Mouth”), Rigel (“Foot”), Thuban (“Snake”), Vega (“Plunging [Eagle]”).… The list goes on.
The derivation of Betelgeuse is more problematic than most, but experts today trace the name back to the Arabic yad al-jawza’, “The Hand of the Giant”—the giant being Orion. A transcription error, confusing the initial letters b and y (in Arabic, ba and ya) because of their similar shape, dates back to the 13th century, when a star table by John of London (who lived and worked in Paris) named the star Bedalgeuze. Accepting this form, European scholars like the French polymath Joseph Scaliger thought the name meant “Armpit of the Giant” (properly, ibt al-jawza’). But yad al-jawza’ goes back at least as far as the star charts of the Muslim astronomer al-Sufi in the 10th century and is probably much older than that.
“snip”
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