Big Dipper "Star" Actually a Sextuplet System 88
Theosis sends word that an astronomer at the University of Rochester and his colleagues have made the surprise discovery that Alcor, one of the brightest stars in the Big Dipper, is actually two stars; and it is apparently gravitationally bound to the four-star Mizar system, making the whole group a sextuplet. This would make the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet the second-nearest such system known. The discovery is especially surprising because Alcor is one of the most studied stars in the sky. The Mizar-Alcor system has been involved in many "firsts" in the history of astronomy: "Benedetto Castelli, Galileo's protege and collaborator, first observed with a telescope that Mizar was not a single star in 1617, and Galileo observed it a week after hearing about this from Castelli, and noted it in his notebooks... Those two stars, called Mizar A and Mizar B, together with Alcor, in 1857 became the first binary stars ever photographed through a telescope. In 1890, Mizar A was discovered to itself be a binary, being the first binary to be discovered using spectroscopy. In 1908, spectroscopy revealed that Mizar B was also a pair of stars, making the group the first-known quintuple star system."
My big dipper (Score:0, Funny)
I suggested this... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:obvious logical deduction: (Score:5, Funny)
More likely they'll be discovered to be giant glowing tribbles. How else do you explain it going from one star to six in just a few hundred years? ;)
Use extrapolation instead (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Only 78 light years away (Score:2, Funny)
And if that star has a planet that had a species that had a SETI fifty years ago, they would have to keep searching for another twenty to forty years to pick up evidence of Earth having an intelligent species. They'd be waiting until 2119 before they heard the first human voice.
And in 2200 the 2000kg tungsten slugs traveling at .9c begin crashing into the earth
Re:In case anyone was wondering... (Score:3, Funny)