"I'm a shooting star leaping through the sky like a tiger defying the laws of gravity," former Queen frontman Freddie Mercury sang in the classic Don't Stop Me Now. 

Twenty-five years after his death the rock legend now has an asteroid named after him coinciding with would have been his 70th birthday.

Queen guitarist Brian May announced that asteroid 17473 a 3.5km-wide ball of black rubble on the other side of Mars, will be known as 'Freddiemercury'.

May, who has a PhD in astrophysics and an asteroid named after him already, revealed the name by video message to more than 1,200 guests at the 'Freddie for a Day' party at the Montreux Casino on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Behind the venue is the band's former studio where Queen recorded songs like Under Pressure with David Bowie and Who Wants To Live Forever?

The honour was first mooted by Joel Parker, a NASA scientist who previously worked on the ESA Rosetta Mission.

He said: ‘Singer Freddie Mercury sang, "I’m a shooting star leaping through the sky” and now that is even more true than ever before… But even if you can't see Freddiemercury leading through the sky, you can be sure he's there – ‘floating around in ecstasy’, as he might sing – for millennia to come."

Mercury thrilled the music world with his  four-octave vocal range, glamorous outfits and extraordinary writing talent before he died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991. 

 

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