Ursa Minor The tradition of naming the northern constellations "bears" appears to be genuinely Greek, although Homer refers to just a single "bear". The original "bear" is thus Ursa Major, and Ursa Minor was admitted as second, or "Phoenician Bear" (Ursa Phoenicia, hence Φοινίκη, Phoenice) only later, according to Strabo (I.1.6, C3) due to a suggestion by Thales, who suggested it as a navigation aid to the Greeks, who had been navigating by Ursa Major. In classical antiquity, the celestial pole was somewhat closer to Beta Ursae Minoris than to Alpha Ursae Minoris, and the entire constellation was taken to indicate the
Ursa Major I Dwarf to its peculiar look, it was temporarily suspected to be either a dwarf spheroidal or elliptical galaxy. However, it has since been found to be a very distant (about 360,000 ly) globular cluster belonging to our galaxy. Ursa Major I Dwarf Ursa Major I Dwarf (UMa I dSph) is a dwarf spheroidal galaxy orbiting the Milky Way galaxy. Its discovery was revealed by Beth Willman et al. in 2005. Being a small dwarf galaxy, it measures only a few thousand light-years in diameter. As of 2006, it is the third least luminous galaxy known (discounting possible dark galaxies such as