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More to the North Star Than Meets the Eye
__roo writes "By stretching the capabilities of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to the limit, astronomers have photographed the close companion of Polaris for the first time. This sequence of images shows that the North Star, Polaris is really a triple star system. 'The star we observed is so close to Polaris that we needed every available bit of Hubble's resolution to see it'" said astronomer Nancy Evans of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts."
they should nickname the mini star, Cooper
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The star we observed is so close to Polaris that we needed every available bit of Hubble's resolution to see it And everyone says New Year's Resolutions don't work out...
"sequence of images shows that the North Star, Polaris is really a triple star system."
Damit! OK, so which star do I point my sextant at then if I'm trying to find my latitude? Modern science complicates things so much!
[Yes this is a joke, for those who don't get astronomy humour.]
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
"I am as constant as the Northern Star." Always though Caesar was a little unstable and went round and round in circles....
menage a troi?
-verlorenModus-
Another day, another star. Yet this one is important because it is the companion of Polaris? When do we get to see the edge of the universe cafe?
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According to google calculator:
2 000 000 000 miles = 21.5155818 Astronomical Units
which puts it just inside the closest approach of Saturn, but well outside Jupiter's orbit.
Am I the only one who doesn't think that that's very clearly a triple star from the pictures? =P The title of the article made it look like the light we see from it is actually from three really close together stars...but it seems like we're only seem polaris A, since the smaller ones are so tiny.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
Polaris ---> O
Polaris Ab---->.
Polaris A --------->o
I'm amazed that Hubble can resolve two objects that close together, at such a distance, and quite distinctly too! Yes, I know they're both stars and emit light, but even so.
:)
There's life in the old girl yet
And imagine what the next generation will be able to resolve, if it has improved optics over Hubble, and greater resolution.
I'm looking at that image right now and I wonder why the PolarisA and PolarisB stars seen as double star? As far as I see, the B star is very far away from the A star. or do they circle arround eachother?
And could it be possible that the PolarisAb star is (very FAR as well) behind the PolarisA star at this moment?
And because there is this PolarisAb star now, can't you just say the PolarisB star sucks and remove them from the triple star system? so we have still a double star, without that B-star?
Is it just me, or does that picture make it look like Polaris just has some version of an interstellar zit? Maybe it's a boil...
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From the article: "The companion proved to be less than two-tenths of an arcsecond from Polaris... At the system's distance of 430 light-years, that translates into a separation of about 2 billion miles."
I did a little googling, and found that Neptune's orbit is just over 2 billion miles from the Sun. So for reference, Hubble has directly imaged two distant objects that could fit inside our own solar system.
I think they could have gotten more "Oomph!" from their press release if they'd mentioned this fact. Also, they may have wanted to measure the distance in a standard publicity unit, such as roundtrip NY-LA distances ("A little over 350,000 round-trips from New York to Los Angeles").
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I know this article will devolve into a discussion of the relative pros and cons of our current space program and its priorities, but you really have to go outside at night for a few minutes in December or January when it's crystal clear and you're shivering from the cold and even near a city you can look up at those mysterious lights in the sky and get that sense of wonder, and of how small and yet how important we really are.
I don't know much about astronomy, but putting it even on *that* scale makes me say, "wow, that is really, really close!"
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
It's just drifting south over Siberia.
TFA states that the close companion orbits at about 2 billion miles, or about 21.5 AU from the parent. That is a bit more than the orbit of Uranus (19.5 AU) in our own system. They had to stretch the Hubble to its limit to see something as bright as a STAR that was far enough away from the parent to fit most of our entire solar system inside. 490 light years is a long way away.
That's space for ya, nothing for millions of miles, and all of sudden, three stars at once.
Likely the small nearly hidden star is similar to Jupiter.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I don't know the average distance between twin stars, but considering that they're *stars*, not planets, that does seem pretty close to me.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
"With Hubble, we've pulled the North Star's companion out of the shadows and into the spotlight."
Of course, stars are easier to see surrounded by shadow than in the glare of a spotlight. Shouldn't this say, "We've pulled the North Star's companion out of the spotlight and into the shadows?"
Did anyone else think of Tattooine as soon as they saw three stars......be honest
"We only have the binary stars that nature provided us"
Don't give up so easily. Make some more binary stars, instead of making excuses.
SHEESH, IDIOTS!
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
It's retina-burning, hydrogen-fusing, yellow-white-hot star-on-star-on-star action! ;)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
there seems to be a renewed set of discoveries in the Bears recently? First the midsized black-hole in Ursa Major, and now the new companion star in Ursa Minor.
Interesting. I didn't think we would find anything else in this region of the sky....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
No wonder I never got my orienteering merit badge!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
so, which way is north again?
The North Star: Robots In Disguise
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
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Are there, by any chance, any signs of huge robotic beings fighting for the mastery of the galaxy?
You know, that part about splashing Hubble into ocean?
Stupid bastards.
Hubble is the very best thing Nasa has ever put into orbit around Earth.
Leave it the f**k alone..
The closest star to ours is ~278,000 AU away. So relatively speaking, yes, 21.5 AU is indeed "close".
Yes, but Saturn is a planet of Sol (our sun); for another star to be at this distance is "close." Our nearest star is Proxima centauri, a mere 268 000 AU away (approximately).
Polaris A is big. Really, really big. You may think that it's a long walk...
Sorry.
But seriously, Polaris A is a supergiant, about 2400 times as bright as the sun, and Polaris Ab is a main sequence star. 22 AUs is really close for a couple of stars that size!
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Mons Pubis is this... good work troll.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mons_pubis
It's actually part of an eleventy-bazillion star system called "The Milky Way", right?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
And as I writhe in my guilty agony, frantic to save the city whose peril every moment grows, and vainly striving to shake off this unnatural dream of a house of stone and brick south of a sinister swamp and a cemetary on a low hillock; the Pole Star, evil and monstrous, leers down from the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing, save that it once had a message to convey. -- H.P. Lovecraft
Our nearest neighbors, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B orbit each other with a distance that varies from 11.2 AU to 35.6 AU, with Proxima Centauri (a red dwarf) as a distant companion around 13,000 AU from the pair of main stars.
It seems about on par with the A/B orbits, and we still classify the Alpha Centauri system as a triple star system.
So while I'd agree that it's not necessarily close as we know it, I'd also point out that we're rather tiny on an astronomical scale. For the record, I don't know if Alpha Centauri is representative of a typical binary system. IANA astronomer.
Or at least...not a professional one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri
I've been following Polaris #3 instead of Polaris #1.
I'm sure we'll be hearing from the Religious Right about this. "The Star that appeared on the eve of our Savior's birth is actually a trinity - a three-in-one! Just like Jesus! This just proves that it's true!"
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Are you suggesting that, in orbit around a moon of an outer planet in the Polaris system, we'll find an alien artefact which, if docked with by a human ship, will transport it instantly across half the galaxy to make contact with its creators?
Excuse me.
* ring ring. ring ring *
Ah yes. Is that New Rossyth? Excellent. Could you get me Meredith Argent on the line please? Thank you. Yes. I'll hold. Hello? Meredith? Yes. Look, can you get hold of Mic Turner at short notice? And that prototype ship you've been working on? Terrific. Might have a destination for it...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Why so? Most stars that can be seen naked-eye are in the range 4 to 1500 light-years. Stellar motion takes 100,000 years to be noticable, and those stars lifetimes are somewhere between tens of millions and tens of billions years. So considering the naked-eye stars "at this moment" doesn't change them much.
"More to the North Star Than Meets the Eye"
Well I'd certainly hope so, it just looks like a small white dot to me...
Sounds like just the right distance for a proto planetary-system disk to condense, and instead of forming a few gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn in there among the rocky planets, maybe some of the gas giants merged and became massive enough to become a small star... So it's probably common, even...
It would REALLY blow my mind to see two stars of Polaris A's type so close together! That would be wild!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Lately I have been reading the Apollo lunar surface journal. I am up to Apollo 15 which included Dave Scott on the crew. I find it totally wierd to read lines like:
115:31:01 Parker: Roger. Morning, Dave. Waking you up an hour early because we've got a little problem on-board we need addressed.
My mind always fills it in with something about the AE35 antenna pointing module.
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That depends a lot on perspective. As distances between stars go, that's really quite close. Keep in mind that the sun is a fairly small star. For comparison, however, compare this orbit to the diameter of Betelgeuse.
Admittedly, Betelgeuse is huge -- a supergiant, AAMOF. Nonetheless, we're talking about a size that would basically put the two into direct contact --though, admittedly, "contact" with Betelgeuse is a somewhat tenuous term, given that at the outside, it's basically a vacuum (i.e. lower density than our atmosphere).
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Did I hear correctly that almost all "stars" that are visible with the naked eye at night are double star systems? For some reason, that took some of the fun out of looking up at night.
Well a cepheid is a star with variations in brightness... um.. excuse me.... UM? IANAAP, but how do they tell excatly what is a cepeid? I'm just wondering... could a companion orbiting closely to its parent star that was not detected previously have created the conditions that were previously attributed to the parent as being a cepheid variable star??? IS there such a thing as a cepeid or are all of them (or many) just binary stars eclipsing oneanother? Is Polaris really a cepheid? By what observation method can you tell the difference? What is the Cepheid variability in relation to the orbit of this companion? Just wondering because we use cepheids to figur out distances and well, if it turns out there aren't any cepheids or atleast a good number of them are merely binary stars, that's gunna throw a big monkey wrench into a lot of things.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Cepheid variable stars are one of the most basic "standard candles" on which our measurement of interstellar distances depends. Polaris is one of the closest Cepheids.
Cepheid periods depend on luminosity, but the period-luminosity relation is still semi-empirical. Knowing the mass of Polaris (which you can get from measuring the orbital elements of the companion star) pins down one of the important variables in the theoretical model of Cepheids, and so helps firm up one of the basic measuring instruments we use to determine the scale of the universe.
In the past, there have been significant changes in our beliefs about the scale of the universe due to problems with interpretation of variable star data--the discovery that some presumed Cepheids were actually RR Lyrae variables changed things by about a factor of two, IIRC.
Things are a lot better than that now, but it is still good to see that people are working to ensure our view of the universe is as consistent and accurate as possible.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Polaris is really a triple star system
so this why Sun is still excited about PowerPC.
"Show me your tables and I won't usually need your flow charts; they'll be obvious".
This reminds me more of Star Trek Birth of The Federation...i dunno everything with stars
/
reminds me of star trek.... do i have a problem ?
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Well, compared to other binary stars ~21 AU isn't abnormally close; consider (numbers from wikipedia):
Procyon A and B are an average of 16 AU apart.
Alpha Centuri A and B range between ~11 and ~36 AU. However, Proxima Centuri orbits at 4.22 light years or 266,871.415 Astronomical Units.
Algol has two stars only 0.062 AU apart, as well as a third star at 2.69 AU.
Sirius is 20 AU
and you cold calculate more (Beta Cygni) knowing the angle between them or orbital periods (an excercise left to someone who knows the formulas) which is listed on many double+ stars' wikipedia entries. Although the distance between them appears to be pretty typical, I'd imagine this story to be notable for the tiny angle between them.
Polaris B, like our Sun, is about 1000x more massive than Jupiter. That's a lot of gas giants to merge.
The minimum size for a star is a brown dwarf, which is about 70 times more massive than Jupiter. Stars are big.
Apparently Polaris pissed off Chuck Norris...
One good roundhouse kick was enough to dislodge Polaris Ab and set it in orbit.
And don't even ask what happened to Polaris A.
astronomers have photographed the close companion of Polaris
Waitaminute. Polaris is GAY?
I'm quite sure you're mistaken. I'm not Christian, but I have read the Bible, and I believe it claims that the star appeared in the west and that the 'three wise men from the east' followed it to find Jesus. That would preclude it being Polaris.
There are a lot of theories on what the star was, but I've never heard any in which the star is Polaris.
Do you have any references to it being Polaris?
The companion's distance from Polaris A makes me think of 2010 by Arthur C. Clarke, in which Jupiter ignites and becomes a small star.
Maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see, but such statements as "With the best instruments like Hubble, we can push farther into space and study more of them up close." I really have the feeling that these news are here to justify the usefullness of Hubble, so that we don't abandon it. Maybe it's just me tho...
You just got troll'd!