Sargas
- HIP
- 86228
- Designation
- The Sco
- Bayer designation
- θ Sco
- Visual magnitude
- 1.86
- Constellation
- Scorpion
- Name approved by the IAU
- 2016-08-21
The IAU catalogue's account
MUL.SHAR.GAZ, "mul" is the Sumerian designator for stars and constellations, "Shargaz" and "Sharur" are two weapons of Marduk (the city god of Babylon and highest god of the Babylonian pantheon after 1250 BCE). The line I ii 31-32 in MUL.APIN read: "Two stars which stand in the sting of the Scorpion: Sharur and Shargaz", so these star names have originally been given to the stars lambda and upsilon Sco. The Mesopotamian name "Sargas" was linked to the star Theta Sco by Robert Brown Jr. (1893; "Euphratean Stellar Researches Part II.") and its subsequent mention in R. H. Allen's (1899) "Star-names and Their Meanings" popularized its subsequent use.
- Source language
- Sumerian
- Reference
- MUL.APIN I ii 31-32 (Hunger+Steele (2019)), Horowitz, W. (2018) ‘Communication and miscommunication in the southern sky’, in Registers and Modes of Communication in the Ancient Near East. 1st edn. Routledge, pp. 69–84.
Source: IAU Catalog of Star Names (IAU-CSN), Working Group on Star Names. The account is the IAU's own text and is quoted in full: it is published under CC BY.
From Kunitzsch & Smart
- Layer of tradition
- Sumerian
- Ancient-layer signal
- cue found
- Pronounced
- sar' gas
- Literal meanings
- the Great Smasher; the Great Beam, or Wing
- Periods of use
- Recent / modern
- Transmission notes
- translation
Source: Kunitzsch & Smart, A Dictionary of Modern Star Names, 2nd ed. 2006, p. 53
Layer of tradition and ancient-layer signal are not the dictionary authors' judgement but a keyword reading of the entry's wording. “No simple cue found” means exactly that — the parser found none — not that the name is late.
The fields on this card were read off an OCR layer and are not checked against the printed page. The page number is given so the claim can be verified in your own copy.
This star is not part of any chain in the strict sub-corpus.
Other named stars of this constellation: