Last night I was outside (covering up plants for frost protection) and took a few moments to look at the stars. Then it hit me.... If everything in the universe is moving away from everything else in all dimensions, why do the constellations (Big Dipper, Orions Belt, etc.) still look the same year after year? Wouldn't the stars making up the constellations move apart and change the shape/size of the constellation? Explain, with pictures please.
visit a planetarium that shows the skies as they were thousands/millions of years ago (or will be millions in the future). We are but a moth dancing about the flame.
Basically it would take the constellations billions of years to move by our standards so it's not surpising that in our short history of stargazing they have not changed. Of course, if one of the constellation stars goes out, that could be through any number of causes......
Uh no, some constellations look different to how they did in recorded history. IIRC the great bear is the one that moves the most, in a few hundred years it will look different to how it looks now
I should get around to claiming new constellations if I were you. Leave it to the government/scientists, and we're likely to get some self-named crap. I have already begun on the new Zodiac.
To be precise, the space between galaxies and galaxy clusters is what's expanding. All the constellations are within our own galaxy, which is not itself expanding. The classic thing to picture is raisin bread baking, where the galaxies are the raisins.
Also true. (Unless the "Big Rip" theory is true and one day the expansion of space - spurred by Dark Energy - will even affect the space between atoms! ) And the constellations *do* look different than they did 1000's a millions of years ago.
It takes more than a few decades for the human eye to notice shifts in position of the stars. I think the Pyramids of Giza used to line up with the stars in Orion's Belt or something a few thousand years ago, but now they're slightly off. Also, the North Star actually changes every few thousand years. It will stop being Polaris around 3000 AD. Vega will eventually become the North Star around 14,000 AD.
Far too slow moving to notice, even compared with the Earth's precession, which takes several lifetimes to be noticeable.
As quite a few people have pointed out the stars are moving, however the distances are so vast that it takes a long time to notice any change. Keep in mind that although constellations look like clusters of stars from Earth the individual stars which make up a constellation can be hundreds or even thousands of light years from each other. They might be moving at crazy speeds but the distances are even larger.
