Now, I'll preface this by saying that I don't have a very deep knowledge of Latin. Being Italian, I studied it in high school, and that's about it. However, I find this subreddit a very interesting place, so I like to lurk in here from time to time.

I am also an (amateur) linguist, so topics related to linguistics naturally appeal to me. One of the topics I find the most interesting is the one of synonyms; of course, it's usually said that true synonyms don't exist, because there are always differences in context, register, et cetera; however, it's not always easy to discern these differences within languages of the past, since we don't have native speakers to ask to, obviously.

Now, I have been quite surprised by the high number of word for 'star' there seems to be in Latin. You have stēlla and sīdus, the native Latin words, but also astēr and astrum, borrowed from Greek.

I was wondering if anyone here could shed some light in the differences in usage and, maybe, meaning with these words. I know nothing about this, but I expect the terms borrowed from Greek to sound a bit 'higher', and maybe more elegant; after all, that's the situation with the Italian descendants: 'astro' is definitely higher in register than 'stella' - sīdus didn't leave any descendants in Italian.

Thank you very much!