Thnx to all, for the answer. I had a good time discussing and clearing my doubt.
In: 179
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
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.
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’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
The “seven sisters” constellation used to have seven visible stars, 100,000 years ago. One is behind the other now, so there are only 6 visible at the moment. That’s the only constellation I’m aware of where the apparent distance of the stars is close enough to have possibly mattered. Whether the name is actually 100,000 years old or just a coincidence is uninown. https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.09170
Everything else having been said, it is scattering… just our scale isn’t long enough to have seen a meaningful change. There are videos on the internet showing what they will look like as time goes on
According to the calculations we’ve made, the solar system is going around the galaxy every 250 million years or so. The other starts are moving in tandem. So, for all intents and purposes, they are somewhat stationary compared to one another, at least for the small amount of time we have been observing and recording them.
They do. There even is a term for it in astronomy: “proper motion”
The thing is the sun and all the other stars in the galaxy move around the center of the galaxy together.
You can think of it as riding a carousel and seeing all the other kids on the carousel with you appearing to be staying still in relation to you while you ride in circles together.
Still some stars noticeably move against the background of the stars.
Banard’s star moves at more than 10 arcesecond per year (an arcesecond being a 1/60 of an arcminutes and an arcminure being 1/60 of a degree).
That might not sound like much but it is a far cry from being a fixed star and it adds up to maybe a quarter of a degree over a human lifetime. Meaning it moves about half the apparent size of the moon during a human life is the human has good healthcare.
It is not noticeable for most people but if you have a sci-fi story set a few millennia in the future and you might want to be careful how you show the night sky if you want to avoid angry tweets by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
>Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
It takes the Sun 226 million years to orbit the Milky way. We started naming/documenting constellations only about 10,000 years ago
Go look up at the night sky, note where things are, then go check 24 minutes later. The Earth will have completed a greater percentage of its orbit around the sun in those 24 minutes than the sun has completed around the galactic core since humanity invented writing
Stars do move and change over time but the distances are insane relative to the speed so it takes a longgg time. The brightest star in Orion’s belt is Alnilam about 2,000 light years from Earth. To get it to move even 1 degree in the sky it’d need to cover 35 light years, to cover that since the founding of the Roman empire (27 BC) and today would require it move at 1.7% the speed of light. Basically no star is moving close to that fast except a couple oddballs that get wayyy too close to the blackhole in the core
The signs of the zodiac and their applicable dates have changed since they were set around 1000 years ago:
|Star sign|Was From|Was Days|Now From|Now Days|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Aries|Mar 21|30|Apr 19|25|
|Taurus|Apr 20|31|May 14|37|
|Gemini|May 21|31|Jun 20|31|
|Cancer|Jun 21|32|Jul 21|20|
|Leo|Jul 23|31|Aug 10|37|
|Virgo|Aug 23|31|Sep 16|45|
|Libra|Sep 23|30|Oct 31|23|
|Scorpio|Oct 23|30|Nov 23|7|
|Ophiuchus|||Nov 30|18|
|Sagittarius|Nov 23|29|Dec 18|32|
|Capricorn|Dec 22|29|Jan 19|28|
|Aquarius|Jan 20|30|Feb 16|24|
|Pisces|Feb 19|30|Mar 12|38|
“Zodiac” is both an astrological **and** astronomical term. You probably know that the solar system is disc-shaped; if you extend that disc until it meets the next galaxy, then that galaxy is on the zodiac. *Which* galaxy is the one you would see during the day if the Sun didn’t exist, or the one which is visible in the southern night sky, but six months early (or late).
Latest Answers