A year after her death, Barbie Hsu’s name is now written in the stars after extraordinary asteroid honour

TAIPEI, June 22 — More than a year after her death, Taiwanese actress Barbie Hsu has received one of the rarest tributes imaginable — an asteroid has officially been named in honour of the beloved Meteor Garden star.

According to South Korea’s Hankook Ilbo, the International Astronomical Union’s Working Group for Small Bodies Nomenclature has approved the name Xuxiyuan — Hsu’s Chinese name — for asteroid 208663.

In a further tribute, asteroid 208664 has also been named Koojunyup, after her husband DJ Koo’s Korean name, making the couple one of the rare celebrity pairs to be honoured together in the asteroid registry.

The proposal came from Hong Kong astronomer Yang Guangyu, a former president of the Hong Kong Astronomical Society, who first observed the asteroid from Arizona’s Desert Eagle Observatory in 2002.

Hsu joins an elite group of Asian entertainment icons honoured in the same way, including Leslie Cheung, Teresa Teng, Andy Lau, Brigitte Lin and Faye Wong, all of whom have asteroids named after them by Yang.

Hsu shot to pan-Asian fame as spirited heroine Dong Shancai in the blockbuster 2001 drama Meteor Garden, becoming one of the defining television stars of her generation.

She also found love with South Korean DJ Koo Jun-yup of dance duo CLON. The pair first met in Taiwan in 1998 and dated for about a year before separating because of distance and opposition from their respective agencies.

More than two decades later, they reunited following Hsu’s 2021 divorce from Chinese businessman Wang Xiaofei and married in 2022, delighting fans with their second-chance love story.

Their reunion was tragically brief.

Hsu died in February 2025 at the age of 48 after contracting influenza that developed into pneumonia while on a family holiday in Japan.

Since her death, Koo has suspended most of his entertainment activities as he continues to mourn his wife. According to Hankook Ilbo, he has regularly visited her grave at Jinbaoshan Cemetery in Taiwan.