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by venice_benice 889 days ago
well yes, but it likely will be a “telephone number” and not even a simple one like say `2MASS J19593766+2246141` which is 2MASS (the survey name) and the coordinates of the star in the J2000 epoch: 19:59:37.66 +22:46:14.1 .

The Gaia ones (which is the billion star catalogue) look like `Gaia DR3 1827256624493300096`; the number basically contains the rough coordinates of the star as a HEALPix index (along with some other data) so it's not really human readable, but is perhaps more suited for a survey with billions of sources.

Ironically, the Gaia catalogue is incomplete at the brighter end (very bright stars like Betelgeuse for example are not in the catalogue at all) so still needs to be supplemented by other catalogues (and can't be used as a single source of truth to which all other catalogues are cross-matched for example)

HEALPix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEALPix