Thnx to all, for the answer. I had a good time discussing and clearing my doubt.
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They’re a LONG way away, basically. In a couple of thousand years, relative to even the near stars, we’ve barely moved. Come back in a few million years and ask again
I had watched some debate of two guys on ‘flat Earth’ and stars came up. So as you go through the year, stars do move in the sky. Let’s say that Orion is at the west during the winter for you. Well the west during winter points the opposite direction during summer. However, when you consider the North star – No matter at what point we are in the year, North is always pointing the same direction. That is to say that the North star is essentially overhead of our solar system. Not quite relevant, but maybe some are curious.
Edit: I should mention that this is assuming you are looking west at the same time (like 9 at night) obviously we spin every day so west technically points around us every day)
The constellations don’t move relative to each other because they are all in the same cosmic direction and they really haven’t moved far enough relative to the distance of where they are. A star billions of light years in one direction is still going to be billions of light years in the same direction after only 2000 years
They have moved from their original positions but due to the speed at which light travels and the distance between us and them it doesn’t appear they have, as an example it takes something like 3 minutes for light from the sun to reach earth so if our sun just suddenly went out, it would be about 3 full minutes before anyone on earth could see the light disappear.
Even though earth’s orbit around the sun takes up a huge amount of space, it’s nothing compared to how far those stars are.
Imagine if you’re sitting in the stands of a football field, and on the other side of the stadium, there are 2 people sitting in some pattern, near each other. If you moved to both seats on either side of yourself while looking at the people seated on the other side of the stadium, they don’t appear to move in relation to each other, right? That’s because your viewing angle doesn’t change all that much from the seat on your left to the seat on your right, because those 2 seats are too close to each other in relation to how far away those people are.
Those seats immediately on either side of you are like the size of earth’s orbit around the sun, and the people in the other side of the stadium are like how far away stars really are from us
It doesn’t revolve around the galaxy it orbits in our solar system. Just one of millions in the Milky Way galaxy alone. If it meandered around our galaxy we would have periods of thousands of years without sunlight leaving the planet frozen and uninhabitable.
Bruh we are talking distances of lightyears to millions of lightyears away. Over the timespan of humanity we will not notice the movement of stars and deep sky objects with our naked eye. In contrast with extremely high powered telescopes we can and have detected the movement of stars for example one of the lines of evidence for black holes came from the repeat observations of multiple stars orbiting rapidly around a central object in the centre of the galaxy with has been interpreted to be the event horizon of a black hole
Because the last time we were in this point in our orbit around the galaxy (a galactic year, if you will), dinosaurs were still around.
Moreover, you can’t see a single star in the sky with the naked eye that is more than 300 light years away. Considering that the galaxy is over 200,000 light years across, that’s a tiny sphere of stars that are all travelling together. Here’s an artist’s rendering of that scale:
https://images.app.goo.gl/V32N9eS6Ly9VEBih9
Each star is moving fast by human being travel standards, but in terms of distances in the universe its EXTREMELY SLOW.
Our galaxy makes a full rotation in about 200 million years. when we’re talking ~2000 years since Roman times, the galaxy has made about 1/100,000th of a full rotation. If you took a photo of our galaxy 2000 years ago, and today, they would look near identical. Keep in mind that the stars we see are ALSO moving with the galaxy, so there really isnt a whole lot of “Scattering”
just a note, the earth’s revolution around the sun by definition cancels itself out every 12 months so that would not contribute to the relative positions of stars unless they were very close to us. And again, every 12 months the positions would be back to what you’re used to.
There actually is some change as the earth moves on its access, wobble, etc. Just not particularly large. Google the perspectives of solstice, constellations over 10s of millenia.
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