Is this the real life? Is this just astronomy?

Today marks the 70th birthday of legendary Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, and to celebrate, an asteroid nearly half a billion kilometers away has been named after the late singer—quite the gift for the man who once sang of himself as “a shooting star leaping through the sky.”

Queen guitar hero/astrophysicist Brian May, backed by the International Astronomical Union, announced that asteroid 17473—a 3.5km-wide ball of rubble currently located in the main Asteroid Belt between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars—will now be known as Asteroid 17473 Freddiemercury, in honour of “Freddie’s outstanding influence in the world.”Discovered in 1991 by Belgian astronomer Henri Debehogne, the Freddiemercury asteroid loops around the sun at 20km per second. Its elliptical orbit never comes closer than 350 million kilometers to Earth, while its surface only reflects about 30 percent of the light that falls on it, making it difficult to see without the aid of a powerful telescope. “It’s just a dot of light,” said May in a YouTube video, “but it’s a very special dot of light.”Mercury becomes the second member of Queen to have had an asteroid named in their honour, following asteroid 52665 Brianmay, which was first seen in 1998. Indeed, May is a keen asteroid aficionado, having joined up with the European Space Agency to launch Asteroid Day 2016 back in June. Asteroid Day encouraged the public to organise asteroid viewing events in an effort to “raise awareness” of the threat near-Earth objects can pose to the planet.

Mercury joins the likes of the Beatles, Enya, Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Yes, Bruce Springsteen, and Vanessa Mae—all of which have had space rocks named after them. “I think it’s wonderful to name an asteroid after Freddie Mercury,” Chris Lintott, professor of astrophysics at Oxford and presenter of The Sky at Night told the Guardian. “Pleasingly, it’s on a slightly eccentric orbit about the sun, just as the man himself was.”

And, in case you were wondering, the planet Mercury—which is composed of heavy metals and rock, appropriately enough—can be some 222 million kilometers away from the Earth at its farthest point. Over to you to work out the estimated distance between Mercury and the Freddiemercury.