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Comment by wolfgang42 | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a perfectly ordinary name for a variable star:

    V*  - Variable star
    RY  - 16th discovered [^]
    Sex - in the constellation Sextans

[^]: The numbering is a bit strange, it starts at R and goes R, S, T, ..., X, Y, Z, RR, RS, RT and so on. [Edit: I originally did the math completely wrong and said that this was the 50th.]

For more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_star_designation

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Starting a numbering system with "R" may seem weird, but it's perfectly in character for the discipline that declared "metal" to mean "everything in the universe except hydrogen and helium."

"the 2% of the universe that isn't hydrogen and helium", surely.

"The interesting 2% of the universe."

(Though I thought it was rather less than 1%? Enh, apparently I'm too lazy to check Wikipedia right now.)

It has 144 siblings. I wonder how that happened.

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=V*+RY+Sex&NbI...

Weird. A base 9 counting system? At first, I counted it off as octal (thinking z for zero), which seemed pretty reasonable, but then I realized my mistake.

Now I read the wiki article, and it's not even nonary.

It doesn't actually have a standard base at all; they seem to have discovered several times that there were more variable stars than they expected and had to extend the system in increasingly convoluted ways.

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