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 Minor and dimming at a rate of 0.02 magnitude a year. Its distance has been calculated as 5,000±800 parsecs (16,300 light-years), which puts its location in the galactic halo. Taken from the villain in "The Magnificent Seven", Calvera is the nickname given to an X-ray source known as 1RXS J141256.0+792204 in the "ROSAT All-Sky Survey Bright Source Catalog" (RASS/BSC). It has been identified as an isolated neutron star, one of the closest of its kind to Earth. Ursa Minor has two enigmatic white dwarfs. H1504+65 is a faint (magnitude 15.9) star that with the hottest surface temperature—200,000 K—yet discovered for a