Pagru

Not to be confused with AD₆, pagru.

Authors: Susanne M Hoffmann, Eric Mamajek, Gennady E. Kurtik, Euin Choung Kim, David Hilder

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Pagru, The Dead Man or Corpse, is a modern star name adopted by the International Astronomical Union in the IAU-Catalog of Star Names (IAU-CSN). Its origin is Akkadian. It is the name of the star η Aql in constellation Aquila.

Concordance, Etymology, History

The Corpse (Dead Man) next to The Eagle, paintings by Jessica Gullberg (References)

The Sumerian/ Akkadian constellation AD₆, pagru is attested since the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE. MUL.APIN is typically dated "before 1000 BCE" (Hunger and Steele 2019).

Origin

MUL.APIN (I ii 12). In the list of asterisms of the god Anu it is written:

• ^{mul d}Za-ba₄-ba₄ ^mulTI₈^mušen u ^mulAD₆

• "The star of Zababa, the Eagle, and the Corpse."

The Corpse is apparently part of the super-constellation of (god) Zababa with Eagle and Corpse, because this text follows the schema of an explanatory list which associates deities and constellations. The Eagle is in Aquila and the Zababa in modern Ophiuchus. The Corpse is located in the area next to Aquila. Scholars have suggested positions in the eastern parts of Aql and in Del.

Re-Use

As the suggested positions in eastern or east of Aquila almost coincide with the Almagest asterism of Antinous whose stars are well-described by coordinates, it has been suspected that Ptolemy used this Mesopotamian constellation as a template to create the new (political) asterism. At that time, in the 2nd century CE, with early Christianity and Egyptian belief in life after death, it is plausible that the Eagle in Aquila carries the Dead Man (or his soul) to the stars.

IAU Working Group on Star Names

According to the Almagest, Antinous has two stars in his head: the stars now designated η and θ Aquilae. With θ Aql assigned the name Antinous by WGSN in 2024, it was proposed to name η Aql after the Mesopotamian predecessor "Pagru."

The name Pagru was adopted for η Aql A (55 Aql, HR 7570, HD 187929, HIP 97804) by IAU WGSN on 18 June 2026. The star is part of a triple system with a spectroscopic close companion B which is a late-B-type star responsible for the systems UV excess found with the IUE satellite, and a F-type companion C further away (~0.7") first discovered with the Hubble Space Telescope (Evans et al. 2013). The nature and orbit of the B component remains elusive, despite significant analysis of spectroscopic and astrometric data (see recent summary of the triple system by Benedict et al. 2022).

η Aql A is a bright Cepheid of spectral type F6Iab. The star is historically significant to astrophysics as it was the first star reported with variability consistent with what we now associated with the Cepheid variable star class. The variability was first reported by Edward Pigott in 1784 (Pigott 1785), months before the discovery of the variability of δ Cephei by John Goodricke, which would become the prototype for this variable class. Pigott reported the variability to repeat with a period of 7 days 4 hours 38 minutes, which is remarkably close (to within 0.23%) of the modern value quoted in the General Catalogue of Variable Stars (GCVS).

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Reference

• References (general)
• References (early modern)
• Ian Ridpath's website (Star Tales )