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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."
Polaris ---> O
Polaris Ab---->.
Polaris A --------->o
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.
It's a triple star system if they're all rotating around a common centre of gravity, even if PolarisB seems to be quite an outsider (although on the scale they're showing it is probably still at a distance similar to a Kuiper belt object (rough guess) whilst this Ab star is at Saturn distance from A.
I suppose it is possible that Ab is behind A and thus appears further away, but I'm sure they've done their maths and checked it over a lot before releasing the PR.
The North Star: Robots In Disguise
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