Serbian astrophysicist Darko Donevski has given a distant galaxy the symbolic name SL3 in tribute to Serbia’s university students. He stressed that it is not an official astronomical designation, but a researcher’s gesture of solidarity that leaves the galaxy’s formal catalog status unchanged.
In his announcement on X, Donevski said his research team had discovered 17 galaxies in a distant part of the universe a year earlier using the ALMA radio telescope array and the James Webb Space Telescope. He selected one of them for the tribute.
SL3 refers to the Student List, known in Serbian as Studentska lista, and its number 3 position on the ballot in the October 25 parliamentary election. According to the account attributed to MTI and SerbianTimes, the Student List won approximately 53 percent of the vote in the election described as taking place last Sunday. The Serbian Progressive Party’s list, led by former president Aleksandar Vucic, received 39 percent. The party had previously been in power for 14 years.
“From today, Serbia’s university students have their own galaxy!” Donevski wrote. He closed his post with the slogan “The students have won” (Studenti su pobedili). According to Donevski, the galaxy’s light, like the students, had traveled a long way before reaching us.
The galaxy contains stars of very different ages. Some are relatively young; others formed more than seven billion years ago. It also holds substantial reserves of molecular gas that could form new stars in the future.
Gas and carbon-rich cosmic dust had previously kept conventional optical telescopes from observing the galaxy. Measurements from ALMA and Webb, however, revealed an extremely bright central region, with intense star formation contributing to its radiation. Donevski estimates that the galaxy could keep shining brightly for another three billion years.
Official galaxy catalog designations follow the rules of the international astronomical naming system, but researchers commonly give informal names to the celestial objects they study. Donevski hopes SL3 will catch on in scientific publications, conference discussions and press coverage, even though it remains a symbolic name.
