NORTH STAR - POLITY
News: Parliament
is ‘North Star’ of democracy, says Vice-President
What's in the news?
● Stepping
up the legislature versus judiciary debate,
Vice President and Rajya Sabha Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar during the
Parliament’s sitting stated that Parliament
is the “north star” of democracy.
● The
Rajya Sabha Chairperson’s comments come days after the Chief Justice Of India called the basic structure doctrine the north
star for interpreters of the Constitution.
Key takeaways:
● The
Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud had described the basic structure of the
Constitution, laid down by the Supreme Court in the 1973 Kesavananda Bharati
judgment, as the “North Star” that “guides and gives certain direction to the
interpreters and implementers of the Constitution when the path ahead is
convoluted”.
North Star:
● Polaris,
known as the North Star or Pole Star, is a very
bright star around 2,500 times more luminous than the Sun.
● It
is part of the constellation Ursa Minor,
and is around 323 light years away from the Earth.
● Polaris
seems to have been first charted by the Roman mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy, who lived from about 85 to 165
BC.
Features:
● Since
Polaris is less than 1° away from the
north celestial pole, almost in direct line with the Earth’s rotational axis,
it appears to sit motionless in the northern sky, with all the other stars
appearing to rotate around it.
Significance:
● Its
position and brightness have allowed humans to use it for navigation since late antiquity.
● Simply
the elevation of the star above the horizon gives the approximate latitude of
the observer. In the northern hemisphere, if you can spot Polaris, you can tell
the north and by extension, the other three directions as well.