Neddy Swenson, age almost 9: for his question:

Does the Pole Star move around an orbit?

For many centuries the Pole Star has pointed out the direction north to travelers upon Earth. Though it is not among the brightest of our stars a'~anest everyone knows how to find it, First find the big dipper and draw an imaginary line through the two bright stars which form the side of the bowl opposite the handle. Follow your line over the sky till you come to a lone bright star  it is alpha of, the Little Bears the guiding Pole Star or Polaris.

Polaris hag been a useful fixture in our skies for so long that we tend to think it will never change, Actually like everything else in our universes it is changing all the time. And what’s more we are also gradually changing our position in relation to it. It has not always pointed out the north direction to us nor will it continue to do so.

Our Pole Star itself is actually two stars in one   a double star, The star we see is two stars which are close enough to be seen as one, The distance apart may be great as compared with distance as we think of it in everyday life but it has been found that most of these double stare are close enough for each to feel the gravitational pull of the other. When this is so the great stars are constantly running in orbits around each other. It may well be that both of the stars which blend to form our Polaris are slowly turning in orbits around each other.

One of these stars is called a variable star   it changes in brightness. The variable of Polaris pulses bright and fades once in every four days,

Polaris   both of whom is a member of the great galaxy of stars we call the Milky Way. This vast system of stars is spinning around like a cartwheel and Polaris, together with our sun, our Earth and every speck in the heavens is moving with it, Our Earth makes this revolution at the rate of 170 miles a second. Space is so large, however, that this motion makes little change in the stars seen from Earth.

Polaris will lose its northern position some day because our spinning Earth wobbles a little from side to side. Sometimes the North Pole points to one part of the sky, sometimes to another. A complete wobble of this kind takes Earth about 26,000 years to complete. Right now, our North Pole is pointing slightly away from Polaris. In about 12,000 years it will point directly to the bright star we call Vega ands for a time, Vega will be the North Star. In the meantime, we can put our trust in Polaris for quite a while yet.