50 Fun Facts About Polaris

In 2008 NASA beamed which Beatles song toward Polaris to mark the agency's 50th anniversary?

Across the Universe. NASA sent it from a giant dish near Madrid on the 40th anniversary of the song's recording, and Paul McCartney's message to the agency was "Send my love to the aliens."

What kind of star is Polaris Aa, the main component of the system?

Yellow supergiant. Polaris Aa has used up the hydrogen in its core and swollen to dozens of times the Sun's width, an unstable stage in which the whole star slowly pulses.

Like Polaris, which nearby star is really a triple system?

Alpha Centauri. To the eye it is one point of light as well, but a telescope splits it in two, and its third member, Proxima, the nearest star to the Sun, is too faint to see unaided.

Which astronomer discovered Polaris B, the North Star's faint outer companion, around 1780?

William Herschel. He had come to England to work as a musician and built his own telescopes as a hobby; within two years of spotting Polaris B, that hobby led him to the planet Uranus.

Which space telescope gave astronomers their first direct view of all three stars in the Polaris system?

Hubble. Astronomers had long known from the star's motion that an unseen companion hugged Polaris, but the pair sit so close together that no telescope had managed to show it until 2006.

Polaris is the closest example of which class of pulsating star, used as a 'standard candle'?

Cepheid variable. The slower one of these stars pulses, the brighter it truly is, so timing the pulse and comparing it with how bright the star looks tells astronomers how far away it is.

Who found that brighter stars like Polaris pulse more slowly?

Henrietta Leavitt. She found the rule while measuring photographic plates as a Harvard 'computer', and it later let astronomers prove that other galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way.

Which astronomer proved in 1911 that Polaris varies in brightness?

Ejnar Hertzsprung. The flicker had been suspected since 1852, but it is so slight, about a tenth of a magnitude then and far less now, that it took almost sixty years to prove.

Research reported in the journal Science suggests Polaris has done what since Ptolemy catalogued it?

Brightened about 2.5 times, from the third magnitude Ptolemy recorded to second today. Astronomer Edward Guinan said that, if real, the change is 100 times larger than stellar evolution theory predicts.

Approximately how far away is Polaris, according to the Gaia mission?

446 light-years, so the light reaching your eye tonight set out in the late 1500s, during the reign of Elizabeth I. The earlier Hipparcos satellite had put the star slightly closer, at about 430 light-years.

Many people assume the North Star is the night sky's brightest; which star really holds that title?

Sirius. The North Star ranks only about 48th in the night sky; its fame comes from holding its place while every other star wheels around it.

When the Plough sits too low to see, stargazers find Polaris using which constellation on the star's opposite side?

Cassiopeia. Its bright W lies on the far side of Polaris from the Plough and both wheel around the star, so when one is down near the horizon the other is riding high.

In the northern hemisphere, the height of Polaris above the horizon gives a navigator approximately what?

The observer's latitude. Sail the Caribbean at 16 degrees north and Polaris stands 16 degrees above the horizon; reach the North Pole and it is straight overhead.

Which two stars in the bowl of the Plough are the 'pointers' that lead the eye to Polaris?

Dubhe and Merak. Run a line from Merak through Dubhe for about five times the gap between them and you reach Polaris at any hour and in any season, because the whole Plough wheels around it.

Why does the pole star change over time?

Earth's axis wobbles in a 26,000-year precession, like a slowing top, because the Moon and Sun tug on the planet's bulging equator, and the pole it points to sweeps past one star after another.

Which star in Draco served as the pole star when Egypt's pyramids were being built?

Thuban. Faint and easy to overlook today, it once marked the pole more precisely than Polaris ever will, passing within a fraction of a degree of it around 2800 BC.

Which bright star will be the pole star in roughly 12,000 years?

Vega. The title of pole star passes from star to star and comes back round: Vega last held it about 14,000 years ago and, as the fifth-brightest star in the night sky, will far outshine Polaris.

Which Greek explorer reported around 320 BC that no star marked the celestial pole?

Pytheas. He placed the true pole in an empty patch of sky that made a rough square with three nearby stars; in his day Polaris still circled more than ten degrees away.

Kochab and Pherkad, the two bright stars in the bowl of the Little Bear, are known by what nickname?

The Guardians of the Pole. The pair wheel around Polaris every night as if protecting it, and some three thousand years ago the brighter one, Kochab, was the nearest thing the sky had to a North Star.

Which star is the southern counterpart of Polaris, lying about one degree from the south celestial pole?

Sigma Octantis. At magnitude 5.5 it is barely visible to the naked eye, so southern navigators have always ignored it and found the pole with the Southern Cross instead.

Which abolitionist founded the 1847 anti-slavery newspaper The North Star, named for the star freedom seekers followed?

Frederick Douglass. He launched it in Rochester, New York, after a speaking tour abroad, striking out on his own from his mentor William Lloyd Garrison, whose paper was The Liberator.

Which explorer calmed a frightened crew by explaining that the pole star, not the compass needle, had moved?

Christopher Columbus. It happened on his first Atlantic crossing in 1492, when Polaris still circled about three and a half degrees from the true pole, enough to show against a compass.

In which Shakespeare play does the title character call himself 'as constant as the northern star'?

Julius Caesar. He makes the boast seconds before the conspirators stab him, and it is an anachronism too: in the real Caesar's day no star stood at the pole.

The old English word 'lodestar' for Polaris means what?

Guiding star. 'Lode' once meant a way or course, as in lodestone, the 'way-stone' used to make compass needles, and lodestar still names anything a person steers their life by.

The word 'cynosure' comes from a Greek name for the Little Bear meaning what?

Dog's tail. The Greeks called the curve of stars ending at Polaris Kynosoura, and because sailors kept their eyes on it to steer, 'cynosure' came to mean anything that draws every gaze.

In the Hindu Puranas, which devoted young prince did Vishnu reward with a place as the pole star?

Dhruva. Slighted by his father's favourite queen at the age of five, he went into the forest to meditate, and Vishnu rewarded his devotion with a lasting place among the stars.

In the African-American folk song 'Follow the Drinking Gourd', the drinking gourd stands for what?

The Big Dipper. The folklorist who published the song in 1928 said it was a coded map for people escaping slavery, steering them north by the Dipper's stars, though no trace of it from before 1910 has been found.

Which state's flag, designed by schoolboy Benny Benson in 1927, shows the Plough and Polaris?

Alaska. Benson, a boy at a children's home in Seward, won a contest for the territory's schoolchildren, and wrote that the star stood for 'the future state of Alaska, the most northerly in the Union'.

Which Arctic territory puts Polaris beside an inuksuk on its flag and coat of arms?

Nunavut. The territory calls the star Niqirtsuituq, and on the flag it stands for more than navigation: it also represents the steady leadership of the community's elders.

The Polynesian Voyaging Society's navigators call Polaris Hokupa'a; which language is the name from?

Hawaiian. The society's canoe Hokule'a reached Tahiti in 1976 guided by the Micronesian master Mau Piailug, who then taught Hawaiians the nearly lost art of navigating without instruments.

Which handheld instrument do navigators use to measure how high Polaris sits above the horizon?

Sextant. The design is about 300 years old, yet NASA had astronauts test a handheld one on the International Space Station in 2018 as a backup for finding the way home from the Moon.

The Polaris weapon of 1960 was notable as the first American ballistic system launched from where?

A submerged submarine. USS George Washington fired two from beneath the Atlantic in July 1960, and her captain signalled President Eisenhower: 'Polaris, from out of the deep to target: perfect.'

Under a 1963 deal, which country bought Polaris missiles from the United States for its nuclear deterrent?

Britain. The deal rescued London's deterrent after Washington scrapped Skybolt, the air-launched missile it had been promised, and the new Polaris force was on duty by 1968.

The Polaris Music Prize is awarded annually to the best album from which country?

Canada. A jury of critics and broadcasters picks the album on artistic merit alone, and the cash prize, 50,000 dollars at its peak, was cut to 30,000 in 2025 when sponsors reduced their backing.

Which older British album award was the model for the Polaris Music Prize?

Mercury Prize. It was set up in 1992 as an alternative to the industry's own Brit Awards, and Polaris borrowed its idea of a jury naming one album of the year on merit alone.

Polaris Inc., founded in 1954, made its name as a pioneer of which vehicle?

Snowmobile. Co-founder Edgar Hetteen later left and started the rival that became Arctic Cat, so two of snowmobiling's biggest names trace back to one man.

Which historic American motorcycle brand did Polaris Inc. buy in 2011?

Indian. Polaris revived the 1901 marque and in 2017 shut its own Victory brand to concentrate on it, only to agree in 2025 to sell control of Indian after all.

Marvel's Polaris, the green-haired mutant Lorna Dane, is the daughter of which villain?

Magneto. She was told he was her father in only her second appearance, then persuaded it was a trick, and readers waited until a 2003 story's DNA test to learn it had been true all along.

Marvel's Polaris has long been the on-off partner of which X-Man?

Havok. Lorna Dane and Alex Summers were first paired by Roy Thomas and Neal Adams in 1969, and have since been brainwashed into villains together, split up and reunited many times.

The private Polaris Dawn mission of September 2024 was the first ever to do what?

Conduct a commercial spacewalk. The capsule has no airlock, so the whole cabin was emptied of air and all four crew, suited up, were exposed to the vacuum of space at the same time.

Who bankrolled and commanded Polaris Dawn?

Jared Isaacman. The payments entrepreneur, who had already paid for and led the all-civilian Inspiration4 flight, went on to become NASA's administrator in December 2025.

Which Greek philosopher urged sailors to steer by the Little Bear, as the Phoenicians did?

Thales of Miletus, by Greek tradition. He was reputedly of Phoenician descent himself, and the advice was sound: the Little Bear circles closer to the pole than the Great Bear, so it gives a truer north.

By what method did astronomers first measure the mass of Polaris directly?

From its orbit with a companion: a faint star circles Polaris about every 30 years, and tracking that slow dance let astronomers weigh the bright star at roughly five times the Sun's mass.

Polaris Dawn's four astronauts rode to orbit in which spacecraft?

Crew Dragon. From the capsule, engineer Sarah Gillis played a Star Wars theme on her violin, a performance beamed to Earth over the Starlink laser links the crew were testing.

Polaris was once called Stella Maris, 'star of the sea', a title better known as belonging to whom?

The Virgin Mary. The title is thought to have begun as a copyist's slip, stella for stilla maris, 'a drop of the sea', and by 1524 a printed star chart was giving it to Polaris as well.

Finnish folklore pictured the sky wheeling around Polaris; what did Finns call the star?

The nail star. Finns imagined the sky as a great lid, with this star as the nail fastening it to the pillar that held it up, which is how the heavens could spin without falling.

Named after the North Star as a symbol of freedom, the nonprofit Polaris long ran America's national hotline against what?

Human trafficking. Two Brown University students founded the group after learning that six Korean women had been held like slaves in Providence, their own college town.

The Lakota name for Polaris, Wičháȟpi Owáŋžila, translates to what?

The Star that Sits Still. In the Lakota story he married Red Cheeked Woman, and when she fell from the heavens he was left gazing down from the land above in grief, which is why he never moves.

Which body formally approved the proper name Polaris for Alpha Ursae Minoris Aa in 2016?

International Astronomical Union. Until its Working Group on Star Names began approving names in 2016, 'Polaris' was only tradition; officially the star had just catalogue designations such as Alpha Ursae Minoris.

Which two US states both depict Polaris on their state flags?

Maine and Minnesota. Maine's star sits above its shield as a nod to the motto Dirigo, 'I lead', and Minnesota, whose motto means 'Star of the North', made an eight-pointed star the centrepiece of its 2024 flag.