Is there another star called "WISE 2348-1028"? The [2] could be trying to differentiate from the duplicate name. Though idk how many star systems you've explored in your game or how many unique star names are available in a known stars game.
I checked, and the only star by that name in the DB is the one with [2]. Several more examples exist, and all are WISE stars.
- WISE 2255-3118[2]
- WISE 2319-1844[2]
- WISE 2325-4105[2]
- WISE 2340-0745[2]
- WISE 2344+1034[2]
- WISE 2348-1028[2] - this is the one in question
There are half a dozen stars with this odd feature in their names, and [2] is the only number used in this way. Another half-dozen stars have parentheses instead:
- Zeta(2) Reticuli
- Zeta(1) Reticuli
- Nu(2) Lupi
- Xi(2) Centauri
- Tau(1) Gruis
- Giclas (G) 112-54
I didn't find any names with braces.
The one clue here is Zeta Reticuli which has a (1) and (2) name in the DB, suggesting that it might be two halves of a widely-spread binary star system. A quick Google confirms that Zeta Reticuli consists of two stars separated by roughly 560 billion km which is only 0.06 LY but far enough apart that there'd be really no point in having both stars in a single system - the space is all but uncrossable except with Lagrange Points, and the latter just makes the whole thing exceedingly silly. The next three stars with parentheses are real stars which actually have that number in their names, as they share the same name otherwise with one or more additional stars. The parentheses however seem to be a Steve addition rather than the "correct" format, similar to hyphenated names like Pi-3 Orionis. The Giclas star I have no idea about as nothing comes up on a search
Returning the the question of the WISE [2] stars, however, nothing useful comes up on Google. Several of the stars have Wiki entries in the Dutch language, oddly enough, but that's about it other than trawling the astrometric databases which is way more trouble than I want to go to today. Assuming none of these are second components of binary systems (none has a pair with the same WISE identifier in the DB), my best guess is that Steve at some point was editing the DB, added the [2] to a few new entries for stars he was modifying, deleted the old ones, and forgot to fix the names.