To which galaxy does the pole star belong?

Answer

All stars that we can see with the naked eye, including the pole star, belong to the same galaxy, our own, which we call the Milky Way.

We can’t take a picture of it because we’re in it. But from here we can get a good idea of ​​what it should look like from afar. You may have seen the Milky Way on a dark night, a relatively bright band that circles a large circle around us in the sky. This tells us that most of the stars in our system, including the Sun, belong to a large disk of stars and interstellar dust and gas. Because of that interstellar dust, we can’t see through the entire disk, we only see our own environment, several thousand light years away. In reality, the diameter of that entire disk is about 100 thousand light-years, and we are about 30 thousand light-years from the center.

The disk of the galaxy is not quite thin, it is a thousand light-years thick ore. That means that close to us we also see stars above and below the Milky Way, one of which is the North Star.

If we look deep into the universe, we see ‘nebulae’ that are actually separate galaxies like our own. Only one of these we can see with the naked eye, the Andromeda Galaxy (google it), at a distance of 2 million light-years. We see Andromeda as a faint nebula, we cannot distinguish individual stars in it without telescopes; if we can see that galaxy, it’s because it has hundreds of billions of stars, just like ours for that matter.

All those galaxies come in different shapes. A large class of them have a disk like us, and in that disk we see that the brightness of the stars describes spiral structures. We call them spiral galaxies. Through all kinds of measurements, such spiral structures have also been distinguished in our own system. So we are in a spiral galaxy.