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Julius Caesar might have said he was as constant as the northern star, but it wasn't much of a boast. Over the past two millennia, the star Polaris has brightened by 250 per cent, astronomers announced today.And they can't explain why."It should not be getting that bright that fast," said Edward Guinan, an astronomer at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. "It's not behaving as expected. It's kind of scary."Scientists knew that Polaris was inconstant but in a different way. About every four days, the star increases and decreases ever so slightly in brightness.But the new work is the first to...

In Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," the title character declares, "But I am constant as the Northern Star, of whose true fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament." In modern astronomical terms, Caesar was saying that he was a flaky, unstable guy. Astronomers have known for some time that Polaris, the North Star, sitting almost directly over the North Pole, is a Cepheid variable, a type of star that is caught in a cycle of bloating and collapsing because it has exhausted its hydrogen fuel. In this unsettled state, Polaris brightens and dims every four days or so,...