Sunday 28 November 2010

positional astronomy - Why do stars seem not to move relative to each other?

They do move - just far too slowly for you to detect by eye even over several human lifetimes.




Space is big. Really 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, but that's just peanuts to space




Douglas Adams, "The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy"



Even the closest stars are a very, very, very long way away so their apparent movement relative to each other is going to be very small.



You can see the same effect when looking out of a moving vehicle through the side windows. You see the objects closest to you rushing past, but objects on the horizon appear to move much more slowly. Now, scale that up by many orders of magnitude to interstellar distances and you'll see why the stars don't appear to move relative to each other.



There's software that simulates the night sky and you can run time backwards and forwards - if you wind it far enough you'll see the constellations change.

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