I read once that since stars and galaxies are all moving through space (away from the original big bang), eventually the constellations we see will no longer exist because the stars will have separated too much. Is this true?
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mystified
ANSWERS: 2
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Not exactly. Galaxies are generally moving apart because of the expansion of the universe. The further away they are the faster they are getting further from us. But the stars in our galaxy and our local group of galaxies are still gravitationally bound and aren't being pulled apart by the expansion. The expansion is actually quite tiny over those distances. However, all the stars in the galaxy are orbiting around the center - and so the constellations change. Some have even changed noticably since the Egyptians built the Pyramids. An odd few scientists think that the universe is expanding in a way that makes the expansion more noticable over time so that it will eventually pull apart galaxies, stars, planets, rocks, molecules, atoms, and even protons. This is called the Big Rip.
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actually there are time photos generated by computers to show what the constellations looked like 1000s of years ago and what they should look like 1000s of years in the future. its quite interesting to see the differences.
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