Do Stars Move? Tracking Their Movements Across the Sky

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The stars look static in the sky, but are they moving? How fast, and how do we know? What events can make them move faster, and how can humans make them move?

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Karla Thompson - @karlaii

Before we get going, I’d just like to say, happy 300th episode of the Guide to Space. Here’s to hundreds more.

The night sky, is the night sky, is the night sky. The constellations you learned as a child are the same constellations that you see today. Ancient people recognized these same constellations. Oh sure, they might not have had the same name for it, but essentially, we see what they saw.

But when you see animations of galaxies, especially as they come together and collide, you see the stars buzzing around like angry bees. We know that the stars can have motions, and yet, we don’t see them moving?

How fast are they moving, and will we ever be able to tell?

Stars, of course, do move. It’s just that the distances are so great that it’s very difficult to tell. But astronomers have been studying their position for thousands of years. Tracking the position and movements of the stars is known as astrometry.

We trace the history of astrometry back to 190 BC, when the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus first created a catalog of the 850 brightest stars in the sky and their position. His student Ptolemy followed up with his own observations of the night sky, creating his important document: the Almagest.

In the Almagest, Ptolemy laid out his theory for an Earth-centric Universe, with the Moon, Sun, planets and stars in concentric crystal spheres that rotated around the planet. He was wrong about the Universe, of course, but his charts and tables were incredibly accurate, measuring the brightness and location of more than 1,000 stars.

A thousand years later, the Arabic astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi completed an even more detailed measurement of the sky using an astrolabe.

One of the most famous astronomers in history was the Danish Tycho Brahe. He was renowned for his ability to measure the position of stars, and built incredibly precise instruments for the time to do the job. He measured the positions of stars to within 15 to 35 arcseconds of accuracy. Just for comparison, a human hair, held 10 meters away is an arcsecond wide.

Also, I’m required to inform you that Brahe had a fake nose. He lost his in a duel, but had a brass replacement made.

In 1807, Friedrich Bessel was the first astronomer to measure the distance to a nearby star 61 Cygni. He used the technique of parallax, by measuring the angle to the star when the Earth was on one side of the Sun, and then measuring it again 6 months later when the Earth was on the other side.

Over the course of this period, this relatively closer star moves slightly back and forth against the more distant background of the galaxy.

And over the next two centuries, other astronomers further refined this technique, getting better and better at figuring out the distance and motions of stars.

But to really track the positions and motions of stars, we needed to go to space. In 1989, the European Space Agency launched their Hipparchus mission, named after the Greek astronomer we talked about earlier. Its job was to measure the position and motion of the nearby stars in the Milky Way. Over the course of its mission, Hipparcos accurately measured 118,000 stars, and provided rough calculations for another 2 million stars.

That was useful, and astronomers have relied on it ever since, but something better has arrived, and its name is Gaia.

Launched in December 2013, the European Space Agency’s Gaia in is in the process of mapping out a billion stars in the Milky Way. That’s billion, with a B, and accounts for about 1% of the stars in the galaxy. The spacecraft will track the motion of 150 million stars, telling us where everything is going over time. It will be a mind bending accomplishment. Hipparchus would be proud.

With the most precise measurements, taken year after year, the motions of the stars can indeed be calculated. Although they’re not enough to see with the unaided eye, over thousands and tens of thousands of years, the positions of the stars change dramatically in the sky.

The familiar stars in the Big Dipper, for example, look how they do today. But if you go forward or backward in time, the positions of the stars look very different, and eventually completely unrecognizable.
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Happy 300 - Thanks for such great content!

garrettcarver
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I only watch your videos to fall asleep too. For some reason your voice is really relaxing. You'd be a good psychologist lol.

badasstaco
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I live in newzealand. And for 2 years I've been watching the night sky. And I need to know is it possible for stars to move in one spot. Up down left right zig zag some Moving slow and others moving fast. Even moving in a way I could only describe as clitching. I have 4 locations I can take some one to observe this type of movement for proof. But when you see it you can't in see it so where ever I go now I see stars move in one spot. Even in the city where the light pollution should make what I'm seeing very difficult.

deadme
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If you're going to mention Tycho Brahe, then you're also pretty much required to mention that he most likely died from a burst bladder, which he suffered due to refraining from urinating for too long -- he was attending a banquet and could not bring himself to exit the room because it would have been a breach of protocol.
Apparently, this has led to a Czech expression that translates as "I don't wanna die like Tycho Brahe", which you would use when you need to go answer the call of nature.
(I'm not a little ashamed that this anecdote has been etched in my memory since I first heard it from a physics teacher almost two decades ago, while I keep forgetting over and over what wonders Brahe actually accomplished over his lifetime...)

Oh, and congratulations on the 300-episode milestone! I've been working my way down the playlist for a few months and have hardly ever come across an episode I didn't find super informative and inspiring. Many thanks for lo those many hours of brain stimulation and wonder!

julienguieu
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Music used at 3:51? I checked the description and all the comments but didn't find any reference to it. Reminds me of a few older space games I used to play.

superbrick
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If earth was in a globular cluster the night sky would be bright with stars that's beautiful.

tauceti
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Fantastic stuff. I had to watch some parts a couple times but it clicked for me! The animations help a ton. Thank you!

jackdo
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Nice touch with the background music :) love it.. Congrats!!

chinjeremy
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300? Woah! That's a lot! Congratulations for all the hard and amazing work! I think I'm gonna check the first one to see what you looked like when you still had hair!

MusiCaninesTheMusicalDogs
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Do you have to make much adjustments if your watching a star to see if it has planets? That could take weeks

rickysmyth
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hi fraser would it be possible to animate the observable universe of what it will look like in the distant future? or even in reverse to show how the universe formed from the big bang? congrats on 300 episodes!

thefirefly
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Great! Can't wait for the next 300 :-D

brendansully
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Ian Douglas's new book from the Star Carrier series just came out, and it mentions Shkadov thrusters. Have you been doing some sci-fi reading lately?

berzerkskwid
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Nice video! Good information and great graphics. Thank you. Is it possible to show new crescent moon phases and ecliptic location after sunset for each month of the year in succession? There are a few images of new crescent moons on the internet but not the progression through the year or the actual angles of the crescents. As a matter of fact, oftentimes, the pictures are reversed showing what would be a waning moon rather than a waxing crescent. Thank you.

CarlaWatkins-co
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Pls i need some education. Where are the stars located in the sky?. Beyond the moon or where?

ositandupu
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The 300 :-)

Btw, I have been on the island that Tycho lived on while making his observations. His castle no longer exists but you can see the remains of his observatory and a church has been repurposed as a museum that houses several replicas of his instruments.

And there is a distillery making whisky on the island, The Spirit of Hven :-)

zapfanzapfan
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I'm confused about how we calculated that galaxies don't appear to have enough mass to hold themselves together unless there's invisible matter; how does one calculate the mass of an entire galaxy cluster?

KMallinson
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Hi Fraser,
Another star will be 8600 AU (or thereabouts) from us in a couple hundred thousand years? Thats WAY WAY closer than the Proxima Centauri system. Would it necessarily be the brightest star in the sky?

kurtreber
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سبحانك ربي ما قدرناك حق قدرك،شكرا على هذا الوثائقي

sozimorad
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What do you think the highest distance of visible light the naked eye can see. What is the furthest star from us we can look out for?

qkproductions