Can't anything stay the same any more? Books are electronic, movies jump off the screen to bite you, heros tumble in lascivious scandal, and now a team from New York's American Museum of Natural History, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, Caltech, and the University of Cambridge in England has reported that the Big Dipper, that famous constellation that has been the entree to star-gazing since before Ptolemy, has an extra star in it! Can I please have a time out?
Geez! Back in the good old days, life was so much simpler; either you were on the castle wall, pouring hot oil down on somebody, or you were that somebody, trying to avoid being burned.
OK OK, here's the update. Commit this to memory, and hope that the damn iceberg as big as Manhattan (you heard about that, no?)doesn't go whacking into Australia.
Alcor is the bright star that forms the bend in the dipper's "handle." Astro-geeks have found a new star -- they call it Alcor B (very creative) -- that orbits around ye old Alcor, much like we orbit the sun. Well, Alcor B is a little more leisurely, at 90 years per orbit.
Don't go rushing out into tonight's sky -- it took Palomar's 200-inch telescope to find this -- but the next time you look up there, remember, it's just not the same. The moral, I guess, is, that nothing ever is.
Previously published, 12/17/09
you only just now found this star? In Morocco we've always known about it. In Arab we call the constellation "the Big Dipper and the Extra Star".
ReplyDelete