Something Strange Is Happening to the Iconic Star Polaris 

Back to walking round the barrel with you! That's how telescope mirrors used to be made. Ten strokes with the mirror blank, then physically move your feet ten degrees to the left. Lather, rinse, repeat: 36 times. Then hose the mirroe, and check... If you want to know why a 12" telescope mirror costs a couple thousand dollars, that's why.

Polaris also moves in a small circle,,to small to notice without a larger telescope

@@spaceinyourface The Coral Castle in Florida has a viewing hole with a wire cross hair in it. Your can track that circle just by watching Polaris thru it. It visits every quadrant every night.

Cool.

@@geraldfrost4710 even a 16 dob is barely that much

Funny, how that is.... For me it is the opposite, lol. ;-) I hope to see the southern stars one day (and the very very very much better view of our arm of the Milky Way).

My dear friend. The VERY BEST place to see the Southern Stars is the Outback in Aussie. If you flew into Adelaide, SA, You could add the AMAZINGLY varied scenery of the Ghan train journey up to Darwin. You would be talking about that trip until the day you died.* Just day after day of amazing clear skies and stars like a scattered wheel-barrow-ful of jewels.** *don't touch any of the plants, and don't go near anything like a rock or low bushes where a critter can hide, and you are almost certain not to be poisoned/and or eaten by anything in your whole trip !. ** Advice is void during the rainy season. lol @@CookieTube

I had the same problem in the Southern, but it wasn't always the weather.

Your star is Sigma Octantis, Polaris is not visible for you, well it shouldn't be anyway.

Can't see it here in Australia thats for sure

When my daughter, at age fourteen, asked me what my spirit animal was, I said, "Polaris." That didn't fall into the accepted answer range. "It has a heartbeat. Can you say it isn't alive?"

@@geraldfrost4710I’m more of a Trident guy. But the Polaris could sure flatten some cities!

Great band!

@jasonclouse3080 Damn! Um, rather, Boom! I wrote a story entitled, "The OBAMA Shall Save Us!" about the mirror Orbital Big Assed Mirror Array, the shield that now protects our earth. (Fictional and unpublished) It's a heat engine for keeping heat off the earth. Except, it can be run in reverse... "There is a line of troops coming toward our border!" "Where?" "Well, they were there, but now there's scorched earth and popcorn..."

Shout out to Polaris?

It is ! Don't trust him . Do your on research.

​@@onewordhereonewordthere6975not sure where you did your research, but it was likely the 5,257th page of google.

Yes, JMG, Anton and Isaac Arthur are my three favorite too!

The Big Three

Third vote on the big three, can we start a petition that they all get on one video together and just talk shop? We get JMG and Isaac every year, but adding Anton would make it more, wonderful.

Agree with the big 3. I also love "Answers With Joe"

??? 😂

He is knowledge but those aliens are real. That the story of them have been around for thousands of years. Even the masters painted them in their paintings. That when Columbus was sailing to the Americas he had an alien spaceship encounter. It was underwater. Clue. They don’t come from outer space. They come from the interior of this one, earth. They have a city on the interior of earth. That they have spaceships and have flown around earth and space. Read Genesis 6 and those old clay jars scriptures they found in the Qumran Desert, the book of Enoch. We are told about them in the Bible. The Bible says to look up your redemption is nigh.

I lean towards a understanding that as Carl Sagen said ' we're made of star stuff

@@paulespinosa5195 haha love Carl😍😍😍

Science presented by a wonderful person. In a word, wonderful.

Thanks Anton...... really like your work.😊

Some legends say Karl is still Kamping

@@timspiker😂😂😂❤

Thank you sir. Been thinking the same thing myself !

I agree with that. The fact that our eath orbit is elliptical and not round.

OK, but remember that a lot of the seminal work on Cepheids was done with systems long since verified to be single star systems.

Fortunately, your iPhone will tell you where north is. Except when it is 45° off for no apparent reason suddenly.

sadly same

You make out with stars? Lucky

That's sad. I live on a 2.4M people city and when it's not cloudy, I can normally see it. I thought my city was bad, but dang. Shame.

I’m too close to the equator. For me it’s behind the trees east north east.

This is what I came here to say. 😂

Doesn't 'anywhere on Earth' mean the Northern Hemisphere 😅

Yes, a bit like the Americans advertising as "shipping worldwide", when in reality it means "shipping anywhere in the USA".

​@@givemespace2742*the good hemisphere 😂

The battle between the North and the South

thank you for caring? you meant?

Only in the northern hemisphere...

My home star happens to be a feceid variable.

I did Antares with mine.

I live so far north that Polaris basically seems to be straight up, very difficult to figure out which direction is north just by looking up (you don't have to be as far north as one would imagine for this, it's so far away that it becomes straight up very quickly). Fortunately there are always other ways.

@@exoticgardensalad8095 In the southern hemisphere you use the Southern Cross. Same thing.

It is fiction. Actually it's Kabbalistic science aka mysticism. I'm not saying Anton is lying but he is deceived like everyone else.

You inspired me to look up the details "The southern hemisphere's faint counterpart to the north star Polaris, Sigma Octantis is a little over one degree from the South Celestial Pole. Also known as Polaris Australis, Sigma Octantis is dimmer than 5th magnitude, some 25 times fainter than Polaris and not easy to see with the unaided eye"

@@dnomyarnostaw yep, hence why you use the 'Southern Cross constellation' (also the Crux) to find the South Pole star and navigate around.

They're projected luminaries of sonoluminescence ....no larger than a peanut.

​@@ShawnYoder-gf9jp BS METER OVER 9000.

​​@@FutureChaosTV WHAT 9000?! There's no way that can be right!

Instead of the bfg,

Lol, that was just on Tv last weekend, came in over the antenna on Comet network or something. It's on tv about every two months lately, and I've almost seen the whole thing in 15-minute chunks.

🤔

So since that movie was made about 40 years after Pearl Harbor with a Nimitz class carrier could we send back a Ford class carrier to stop the Nimitz from messing with history?

If that makes you having a bad feeling, I VERY HIGHLY suggest you leave cosmology and astrophysical science as far behind you as possible, lol. ;-)

Why do you have a bad feeling about a star bazillion of miles away from us lmao

And yet, regardless, you're both Stars :)

Bipolar star. ^ ^

Hence why Cepheids are only 1 of the MANY methods used for determining distances. This is nothing new at all. Also, Polaris is not your typical Cepheid. That was the whole point of the video. This does NOT mean all Cepheids are useless.

@@CookieTube How do we know it is not typical? Polaris is probably one of the most studied of the Cepheids and we are just now getting to the point where we are noticing it acting strangely. 1000 years is a tiny amount of time in a star who's lifetime is measured in the 100's of millions to billions of years. How can we measure a star for a few years and assume we know what is normal? Even our own sun has cycles that last a decade or more such as the eleven year sunspot cycles. We did not learn this by looking at the sun and stopping asking questions after the first few observations. Science has to make assumptions all the time, but when we find info contrary to those assumptions we need to update our ideas. With the CMB and type 1a supernova observations giving us quite different estimations for the age of the universe it is obvious that our understanding is not complete.

@@wally837 ​ I warmly suggest to read the second article Anton has linked in the description! And especially watch @drbecky 's latest video titled _"JWST has made the crisis in cosmology worse (again)"_ for an equal good, if not better, explanation. ;-) Spoiler: Standard Candles (which includes Cepheids) are far more accurate than other methods. Polaris is just one (known) outlier in a massive whole dataset of Cepheids which is getting more and more accurate all time. In that regards, Anton apparently did a bad job explaining it. It is the exact opposite of what apparently came across to a lot of people (judging by many comments), or at least what they took away from it. Of course, more data needs to be analyzed and peer reviewed, but all the evidence so far points to Standard Candles (which includes Cepheids) NOT being the problem, but rather the more accurate method. And it is something in (the interpretation of) the CMB-data which seemed to be off. (Which would also be A LOT more exciting for science).

@@CookieTube I follow Dr. Becky as well. I think that maybe I am not explaining well. We only know of the unaccounted for variability in Polaris due to decades of observations. Have we been studying any other individual Cepheids as much as Polaris? If so, has anyone taken these observations of other Cepheids and analyzed them as in depth as Polaris? I will read the article.

"all we know is doomed" And then, they found a way to integrate the new discovery into an already known equation and changing it barely.

IIRC Indians (and Chinese) were the forefathers of astronomy (and other sciences), no?

@@CookieTube read "Varaha Mihira " and his works about astronomy, mathematics. He was invited to visit Persia, Egypt and other places. He went from India to spread the knowledge among other people

Well, yeah. Proxima Centauri is 12,950 AU (.2 ly) away from Alpha Centauri A and B and orbits in 550,000 years. Castor C may be a light-year away from Castor A and B (all three are double stars, by the way).

Theoretically, a companion star can be a pretty long way from the other component(s) in a multiple system, as long as there are no other objects of similar mass to disrupt a potential joint orbit. That would mean, I suppose, that things would be quite different in a globular cluster, where stars can be as near to each other as the (as presently measured) width of our solar system. There has been at least one exoplanet detected in a globular cluster, so perhaps one day we'll see some amazing night skies in reality.

I'd love to hear Anton's answer to this as well. In my view, cepheid variables are proving to be unreliable as a cosmic distance ladder, while CMB results continue to veer away from the cepheid variable results, so it looks to me like we are far from resolving the Hubble tension

Judging from its title, Dr. Becky's latest video is about that topic. I'm heading over there now to finally watch it. You both can come too! :)

It seems more and more likely that the Hubble constant, isn't. Not only is the universe's rate of expansion changing, the rate of the rate of expansion also is. If true, this could eventually lead to a Big Rip.

Resolving the Hubble tension is a very big thing and is by no means easy. Cepheid variables, together with Type Ia Supernovea are the most publicly known *Standard candles* methods, but there is a whole slew of others methods too! There are of course margins of error, this is known, that is nothing new. The news here is that for some of the Cepheid variables we might need to redo the calibration and margin of error calculations, so to speak. *But by no means it means that Cepheid became all of a sudden useless!* Also again, note that for the determining distances, Cepheid variables are by no means the only methods being used. They are just one method out of a long list of methods. In fact, as of lately, *Standard Sirens* have become a thing too (gravitational waves). A highly suggest the Wikipedia article about "Cosmic distance ladder". And if you wanna know more in debt about that (cepheid variables, Hubble tension, etc) but easy digestable, I highly suggest Dr Becky's video's. She has done a lot of them in the last year, specifically talking about the 'cosmology crisis', cfr Hubble tension, etc. She is a astrophysicist, PhD: see @drbecky ;-)

@@randallpetersen9164 erm no. Saying it like that and jumping from _"the expansion is changing"_ to _"this could lead to a Big Rip"_ is wrong and very short sighted/extreme jumping to conclussions. It could in fact lead to anything from 'Big Crunch' to 'Big Rip' and everything in between, including 'Heat Death', 'Big Bounce', etc etc... Not to mention 'Local bubbles', ... etc. Absolutely nothing is off the table (yet). The only proper conclusion would be that we are a bit less certain than what we were before about the extreme distance future of the universe. A LOT of variables and unknowns come into play here. But of all things, the 'Big Rip' hypothesis was, even before, the least likely of all of them and the least supported (but the most 'spectacular' I suppose). 'Heat Death' or 'The Big Chill' is still the most supported hypothesis.

When dealing with outer space, you must think big - very big.🌌

Lol

@@playerroku4412 What is so funny, please?

Stars are vast balls of superheated radioactive plasma. How would climactic changes such such as seasons, be possible?

@@thehellyousay Can't the plasma be affected by differences in gravitational pull during the orbits of the thee bodies, then? There is also the space weather from each star that could affect their neighbours. All this would constantly change depending on the positional relationships. Seasons don't have to be just a planetary phenomenon.

how hard is it to tell if something is by itself at large distances, like what jwst is doing

@@AbsurdAsparagus Well, we have the tools to figure that out now and the telescopes. If we can find planets by the technique, we can tell if the star is solo or has a partner. It likely won't scale to Cepheids in other galaxies due to the resolution of current scopes, but there might be another technique.

​@@johnmoore8599 Cepheid variables are single stars. But many stars are part of binary, trinary systems. That is not a rare thing. In fact, some say it is the other way around: most systems are binary, trinary, ... and solo star-systems are the more rare systems. Also, the point of this video was not to say that Cepheid variables are useless/inaccurate, so to speak!!! The message was that the Pole Star (Polaris) seems to be an A-typical Cepheid. By NO means this should mean that ALL Cepheid variables are inaccurate!!! It just means for SOME Cepheids more observation needs to be done in order to more accurately pin point the variables. Of course there will always be margins of error! And of course this is VERY much known and done! Just as it was already known that Polaris was an A-typical Cepheid to begin with!!!! Anton messed that up, this is nothing new, and was known for decades. And by no means is Polaris the 'golden standard' for the kind of Cepheids used to calculate distances! The 'news' here was that further study has been done on Polaris and now we know a bit more about its non-standard behavior. That is all! Secondly, there are MANY other methods being used for distance calculations. Cepheids are only one method out of many "Standard Candles" (eg: Type 1A supernovea are another kind of standard candle). And "standard candles" are only one general term out of many other general methods to calculate distances (eg: Standard Sirenes is another one). Does that mean all the distance calculations are correct? No, by no means. But they are not wrong either. It 'simply' means more refinement and study is (continuously) still needed to get to an as accurate calculation as possible. It is all about reducing the margin of error. When you only have bananas to measure a distance, you will be somewhat accurate. It doesn't mean all those measurements are plain wrong. It means the margin of error is 'large' and increases the longer the distance is. Hence you seek better fruit, with a more and more constant length. And you use that one 'special' banana, which seems to shrink and grow, as less as possible whenever possible. Doesn't mean all bananas should be thrown out. Especially not when you also have apples which are roughly all the same size too and which you can use the 'average out' errors. Another analogy: This is all just the same as when you always used centimeters to measure stuff, and all of a sudden (because you have better instruments) you discover that millimeters is more accurate and with that you discover that not all your centimeters are exact 10 millimiter, but sometimes 9 or 11.

@@CookieTube Yeah, I know that most stars are not single stars. But, this paper is showing how an orbital partner is affecting a Cepheid variable. Every scientist makes assumptions as part of their work. If you assume the variable star's brightness fluctuates regularly without interference from another star, will that affect your measurements and distance calculations? Astronomers and physicists assume that Type IA supernovas have the same brightness when they explode thereby using them as a standard candle at large distances. Were similar assumptions made with Cepheid variables - that they are not perturbed by other stars? What if those assumptions are wrong? How much error is injected into the distance calculations. Astronomers have the problem of the Hubble Tension right now because your calculations from both your standard candles don't converge, but diverge. Is this divergence due to assumptions that are affecting your measurements and injecting greater errors than you assume? Astronomy is still in its infancy in some ways.

@@johnmoore8599 I think we are both saying roughly the same thing. Except I want to emphasize that it is not because you discover there might be a slight bigger margin of error on this one particular element, that all elements and other methods needs to be thrown out of the window and with that a whole lot of cosmology. Which is what many people now are assuming (see comment sections). The problem is not that Polaris seem to have a more variable brightness period. That was not only pretty much known, the whole analysis of distances using Standard Candles also does not rest on one single star/observation. It is extremely complicated, and there are A LOT of other variables/assumptions which come into play. So, yes, Polaris' margin of error has now become a bit bigger. But, 1) now that we know, this will be taken into account, and 2) again, the whole distant ladder thing doesn't fail or rest upon this single observation. Variations are already taken into account when you use Standard Candles. Scientists very much know that using Standard Candles comes with a whole slew of problems and fuzziness. That is absolutely nothing new. And in fact is EXACTLY why they seek other methods (eg CMB) and EXACTLY why they use JWST now to verify them. To see which main method is the more correct one and why that is. And thus to explain the divergence of the other method. The main problem is the jumping to conclusions from people, derived from oversimplified explanations and sound bites, sensationalized headlines, and lack of knowledge of how things are actually done. More often than not it is not very well communicated how complicated such things actually are (which is very much understandable.... you don't want to produce 5 hour long videos). But the problem with that is that common people tend to jump to oversimplified conclusions as a result. *In fact, what JWST has shown (so far!) is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what 99% of people here now assume because of this **_"Polaris's period changes over time"_** business. Up to this point, JWST has shown that using Cepheid variables seems to be MORE accurate than the other methods (like using CMB data) in regards to the 'Crisis in Cosmology'!* Of course, all this is still under review, a lot more needs to be done, and a lot more is coming from JWST. I highly suggest Dr. Becky's last video about this (@drbecky), in which she explains all this in a much much better way. -- PS: Something I just noticed when rereading your comment, and which might be part of the confusion/misunderstanding: _"our calculations from both your standard candles don't converge, but diverge."_ No, on the contrary. They are getting more and more accurate (also thanks to JWST). What is diverged are the measurements of the 'Standard Candles'-method as a whole, compared to the CMB-data method. That is what the crisis in cosmology is about: either the 'Standard Candle' method (and the likes, like 'Standard Sirene') are wrong, or either there is something wrong with the CMB-data. *So, to circle back, the whole point is: Standard Candles are getting more and more accurate all the time! Despite having a few outliers like Polaris in the data set.*

LOL. Good one.