Star System Name Generator

Real star systems are named in layers. The brightest stars carry traditional names, most of them Arabic (Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Rigel), Latin (Regulus, Spica) or Greek (Sirius, Procyon), which survived through medieval star catalogs. In 1603 Johann Bayer added Greek letters plus the genitive form of the constellation, giving us Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. Later surveys switched to catalog numbers, so a system might be Gliese 581, HD 209458 or Kepler-186, named for whoever recorded it. Astronomers now designate exoplanets with a lowercase letter, so the second planet found around Kepler-62 is Kepler-62 c.

Good fictional star systems borrow one of these layers rather than inventing whole new grammar. A militarized setting might catalog everything as numbers and survey prefixes; a colonized frontier might name systems after captains, home towns or dead loved ones (Tamsin's Rest, Orrin's Hearth). Words like Prime, Major, Minor, Secundus and Reach are useful suffixes because readers already associate them with star charts. Avoid stacking cosmic adjectives such as Nebula Star or Cosmic Wanderer, which read as generic and tell the reader nothing about the place.

The list above mixes real nearby stars, notable exoplanet hosts, IAU-approved proper names and invented systems that follow the same rules, so you can pick a name that fits your setting's tone and level of realism.