Alright. A tall order, but I like challenges! Especially when my perfectionism gets to meet up with someone's clinical OCDOriginally Posted by sozme
1) Whether a specific spot is reasonable. This one is the easy one. Stars with planets that could be habitable can be found anywhere colored blue on the NASA map I linked before. That's pretty much everywhere except the core. Areas between the arms of the galaxy are sparse, so you'd likely not want to place a homeworld there. So anywhere labeled "arm" is 100% viable. No astronomer would argue with it. Additionally, with 400 billion stars in the galaxy, any spot you pick in the arms will have stars.
2) Whether or not the spot you pick has a named star. This is a bit trickier, because it depends on what you mean by "named". We would all agree that Deneb is definitely a named star. But what about Rho Orionis or OGLE-2005-BLG-390L? Both of those are simply technical names for cataloguing. In most sci fi, these kinds of systems are renamed once they're explored, colonized, etc, so as long as your universe is set in the future, you could very plausibly come up with your own names for any star like this an no one would bat an eye. So how far out do the real names go? Well, stars with real names have roots in antiquity. In antiquity you could only name what you could see with the naked eye. The farthest star visible to the naked eye is the Hershel's Garnet Star, at about 10,000 light years from earth. Everything past that should only have a technical designation for a name.
3) Other identifying markers. Here's the beauty. Beyond that ring at 10,000 light years mentioned above, the only stars with any measure of detailed information are the ones that are out of the ordinary. I.E. containing a black hole, a supergiant star about to go nova, one wth a discovered extrasolar planet etc. The good news is that since there are 400 billion stars, if you somehow pick a spot that has one of these, you just move over a few light years and bam, you have a nice, unnamed star that you can do whatever you want with. (For reference, though, the farthest star with extrasolar planets to date is OGLE-2005-BLG-390L, at about 25,000 light years.
So the gist of it here is that if you pick anything past 25,000 light years and stick to the blue areas in the arms, no astronomer or professional could have any rational objection. If you want to pick things within 25,000 light years, consult me. I'm a school teacher, so I never say no to consulting money, but I also like helping people for free, so we can do things however you want.
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