{"id":444,"date":"2006-01-10T16:28:08","date_gmt":"2006-01-10T16:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=444"},"modified":"2006-01-10T16:28:08","modified_gmt":"2006-01-10T16:28:08","slug":"considering_the_north_star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/01\/10\/considering_the_north_star\/","title":{"rendered":"Considering the North Star"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Now here&#8217;s something I didn&#8217;t know: Polaris, a.k.a. the North Star, is actually <i>three<\/i> stars, a trinary system consisting of a supergiant much larger than our own sun and two smaller companions. One of these companions can be seen with a small telescope, but the other is in so close to the big one that its presence has only ever been deduced, never directly observed. Until now.<br \/>\n<center><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Hubble photograph of Polaris and friend.\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/images\/polaris-with-companion.jpg\" width=\"304\" height=\"304\" \/><br \/>\n<\/center><br \/>\nIn this photo, the supergiant is the big white blob, naturally, while the companion star is the much smaller bright spot in the seven o&#8217;clock position. Not surprisingly, the image was captured by the amazing Hubble Space Telescope, which had to be cranked up to its maximum resolution in order to accomplish the job; details can be found in this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cfa.harvard.edu\/press\/pr0602.html\">press release<\/a> from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cfa.harvard.edu\/\">Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics<\/a>. Pretty cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now here&#8217;s something I didn&#8217;t know: Polaris, a.k.a. the North Star, is actually three stars, a trinary system consisting of a supergiant much larger than our own sun and two smaller companions. One of these companions can be seen with a small telescope, but the other is in so close to the big one that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-final-frontier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}