George Sins Jr., age 11, of Chicago Ill., for his question:     

Which is Bernard's Star?

Astronomers have long suspected that oar's is not the only solar system in the Teeming universe. Millions, perhaps billions of other stars in our galaxy may have planets. Recently, it was proved that at least one other star has a planet. The parent sun of this newly found planet is bernard's star, known also as bernard's Proper motion star and bernard's arrow.

Bernard's star is named for Edward Emerson Bernard, the American astronomer who discovered it in 1916. It has been under close telescopic observation since it was first spotted, for Bernard's star is full of surprises. It will ride across the heavens this summer night ,just north of the dull red star Antares, which is in the Scorpion, but your eyes cannot see it.     Antares is a 1st magnitude star, two and a half times brighter than a 2nd Magnitude star. On a clear night, your sharp eyes can see stars of 6th magnitude as tiny, dun dots. Bernard's star is almost magnitude 20 and far, far too dim for our eyes to see. But the telescope can spot and photograph it. And Edward Emerson Bernard was a wizard at taking telescope photographs of the heavens. He worked at the Lick Observatory in California and the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin. Most of his famous telescopic photography was done between 1890 and 1920,     And it includes rare pictures of comets, asteroids, planets and nebulae. In 1916, Bernard spotted a dim star on one of his pictures. He found it on other photographs, too, an unusual star that seemed to be moving at a great rate against the background of stars around it.     All the stars are moving closer or farther from each other, but as a rule the changes are too slow to be observed in a lifetime. This changing of positions is called the proper motion of the stars. And Bernard's Star has the greatest proper motion of any known star. It moves 10 degrees in a year, which means that in 180 Years it moves a distance equal to the width of the full moon.

Bernard's star of proper motion has been called Bernard's arrow. What's more, it has an interesting wobble. In 1963, astronomers proved that this wobbling motion Is caused by the orbiting of a heavy planet. Bernard's star is a parent sun, and the first planetary system discovered beyond our solar system. Bernard also compiled an atlas of the milky way with breathtaking photographs Of swarms of teeming stars, dark clouds, smokey gases and glowing nebulae. His written notes reveal that this expert felt the same awesome wonder we feel for the Dazzling heavens. He described a dark area in the milky way as a "jet black nebula," and the star packed areas reminded him of "great cumulus masses like summer clouds."