Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 164, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 July 1919 — Pole Star, the One Which Seems to Keep Its Place Without Any Movement [ARTICLE]

Pole Star, the One Which Seems to Keep Its Place Without Any Movement

Most people, if they know nothing else of astronomy, at any rate know the pole star, the one star which seems to keep its place in the heavens without movement of any kind, says a writer in the Rehoboth Sunday Herald. There are a great many, however, who do not know what a wonderful thing It Is. In the first place, it can be seen w’hen looked at through a good telescope to be two stars and not one. There is one fairly bright one, of what is known as the second magnitude, and another of the ninth magnitude close to it. But that is not all. The brighter of the two is really three stars revolving • round one another, or, rather, round their common center of gravity, like three children playing “ring a ring of roses.” This secret is revealed to us by wljat is perhaps the most astonishing of all scientific instruments, the spectroscope. It not only tells us -what the stars are made of, but whether they are moving toward us or away from us. When you stand facing the star you are always facing north. The reason that it does not appear to move as the others do is that it is nearly in line with the axis of thd earth, its distance from us is enormous. This can be judged from-the fact that although the earth in its journey around the sun is today about 190,000,000 miles from where it was six months ago, shat makes no appreciable difference to its distance from the pole star. It must therefore be many times 190,000,000 miles away.