Ursa Miner

A very simple joy of mine is discovering that something I thought was one thing is actually a collection of several things or more. And it feels to me that the fabric of our universe is stitched with a principal that runs in that basic direction: the more we look, the more there is to see. One thread like this that we can follow might be the discovery in quantum physics first that observing matter changes it, and then later on that the universe is not locally real. Another one might be revisiting the question of whether the universe is really finite or not.

A much simpler one popped up this morning while I was drinking my coffee and reading up on the North Star, Polaris. As it turns out, the North Star is actually 3 stars, Polaris Aa (a little less than 5 ½ times the mass of our sun), Polaris Ab (a very close companion star that’s about 1.26 times the mass of our sun), and Polaris B (about 1.4 times the mass of our sun and in a much more distant gravitational relationship with Aa than Ab is).

Pretty cool, right? I also learned that Polaris is a Cepheid variable, a type of variable star that serves as a benchmark for measuring galactic and extragalactic distances. As far as I can tell, I think that means that it functions similarly to how 12-inches became standardized as a “foot” because it was the length of King Henry 1’s foot, or how an inch was 3 grains of barley laid end to end.

All of which to say, it was a good reminder for me of how we use what we know to measure what we don’t. And that it’s a good practice to regularly revisit what we think we know, especially the things we see as our guiding lights, and look more closely.