sporades definition - milky way behind trees; all the stars have been captured and labelled.

Milky Way behind trees. Photo by Ryan Hutton on Unsplash

Sporades definition

Webster’s 1913 Edition has this funny little entry that defines sporades:

||Spor”a*des, noun plural. [L., fr. Gr. spora`des. Cf. Sporadic.] (Astron.) Stars not included in any constellation; — called also informed, or unformed, stars.

Sporades - an obsolete word

This word no longer means anything.

This word has been removed from all dictionaries.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) agreed in 1930 to include every known star within the boundaries of a constellation.

Sporades - the wild between constellations

Before that year there were wild places in between constellations where stars could exist. After 1930 all of the stars had been pinned down - like rows of dead butterflies. Every star is now “inside” a constellation boundary.

We don’t need this word sporades any more; all the stars have been captured.

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Comments (1)

starinastar - August 24, 2019 at 4:27 PM

Guy Ottewell mentioned Allen’s Star Names book. So ,I looked it up and found this web version. There is a chapter that talks about the evolution of the constellation names and it mentions the sporades: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Topics/astronomy/_Texts/secondary/ALLSTA/Constellations*.html

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