A closer look
Purchasing a novelty certificate from the International Star Registry gives you absolutely no official scientific authority and is essentially just funding a highly profitable company selling expensive fake documents to gullible romantics. When you pay fifty dollars to name a twinkling celestial body after your significant other, the International Astronomical Union completely ignores it. You are literally just paying a private corporation to type a name into a database and print a fancy piece of cardstock, generating massive profit margins for a product that requires zero manufacturing, zero shipping logistics, and zero actual ownership of the item being sold. It is quite possibly the most flawless capitalist scheme ever invented, successfully monetizing massive balls of burning gas located millions of lightyears away from Earth by exploiting human sentimentality and an impressive lack of basic scientific literacy
