Astronomers Fear Polaris?

With all the scare and hoaxes going on in the skies recently here is an article regarding the star Polaris and how astronomers are freightened by it's recent brightening...


Astronomers scared of ever-brightening star
June 1, 2004 - 10:41AM

smh.com.au...

Twinkle, twinkle ... Polaris

Julius Caesar might have said he was as constant as the northern star, but
it wasn't much of a boast. Over the past two millennia, the star Polaris has
brightened by 250 per cent, astronomers announced today.

And they can't explain why.

"It should not be getting that bright that fast," said Edward Guinan, an
astronomer at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. "It's not behaving as
expected. It's kind of scary."

Scientists knew that Polaris was inconstant but in a different way. About
every four days, the star increases and decreases ever so slightly in
brightness.

But the new work is the first to examine the star's overall brilliance
during the past 2,000 years. Guinan and his colleagues scoured ancient
literature, reading star catalogues back to the one compiled by Ptolemy in
the second century.

By comparing those studies to modern observations, the astronomers measured
the true brightness of Polaris. The team reported its findings in Denver at
a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

smh.com.au...#

Luke 21:26 And men's hearts shall fail them for fear, and for looking after
those things which shall come on the world: for the powers of heaven shall
be shaken.

[edit on 7-6-2004 by Cocco]

i use polaris to align my telescopes and haven't noticed anything abnormal... i'll keep an eye out though.

*shakes head solemnly*

Stars fluctuate in light intensity all the time.

Nothing to worry about. REALLY.

I don't think the scientists are worried 'bout that, it's the 250% increase that's odd, I tend to agree, what would make a star do that?
It could be getting closer but there are techniques available to figure out if that's the case and they didn't mention that..... if the increase is true then something odd definitly is going on.

Well, it could be getting ready to go supernova... which may be bad for Earth, depending on how big the blast is, or how close we are...

i am still yet to notice any increase in magnitude... and i was just out with the scopes again!

Originally posted by Amur_Tiger
It could be getting closer but there are techniques available to figure out if that's the case and they didn't mention that

techniques such as the solar system being tragically askew (if it did actually get THAT close) or the fact that it would shift to a bluer wavelength of light. also, stars don't just move towards one another so readily. well, maybe polaris heard about some great deal to visit the bahamas... who knows!?

Originally posted by ThunderCloud
Well, it could be getting ready to go supernova... which may be bad for Earth, depending on how big the blast is, or how close we are...

i'm willing to bet that won't happen because polaris isn't the type of star that could go supernova. even if somehow it did though, the fact that it's over 430 lightyears away would be no danger to earth.

Here is more info on Polaris....

Polaris Rising

At the Rocky Mountain News: the North Star hasn't always been this bright! The evidence is observations by ancient astronomers...

Both Ptolemy and Al-Sufi listed the North Star as a magnitude-3 star, [astronomer Edward] Guinan said.


The system of magnitudes that astronomers use to rank the brightness of stars was invented in ancient Greece by Hipparchus.

The brightest stars in the sky were labeled first-magnitude stars by Hipparchus. Those about one-half as bright he called second-magnitude stars, and so on to sixth-magnitude stars, the dimmest stars Hipparchus could see.

Today, Polaris is classified as a magnitude-2 star.

That means the North Star is now about 2.5 times brighter than it was 2,000 years ago, a finding that Guinan called preliminary.

"If it's true, Polaris is undergoing much larger changes than believed, hundreds of times larger than expected by current stellar evolution theory," he said.