What cause the different formations of the stars (like the the great bear etc)?

Answer 1

The constellations are just the result of happenstance placement and human imagination.

Answer 2

Often, some of the stars in a constellation are close together because they came from the same star cluster. Stars tend to be born in clusters because they come from clouds of gas which are often large enough to create many stars. Most of the stars in the Big Dipper are part of such a group. Other stars in the constellation are stars closer or further away that just happen to be in the same general direction. The human mind is very good at seeing patterns in things, whether it's faces in the clouds, saints in grilled cheese, or great bears in the stars.

Answer 3

The "great bear", officially called "Ursa Major" and the back end sometimes called "The Big Dipper" is a constellation. Stars are scattered throughout the galaxy. When out ancestors looked up at the sky at night and saw these stars, thier minds played connect the dots and images appeared to them...the same way people see images in clouds.

But the "great bear" only appears as it does from here on Earth. The stars are in three dimentional space, not two dimentional space like a picture on paper, and even though stars may appear to line up to us, that might not be the case at all.

Also, just because stars look close in a constellation, doesn't mean they are. For example, our sun, which is a star, may look like it's in the constellation called Cassiopeia, from one point in the galaxy, and it might look like it's in Orion from another point in the galaxy.

The stars themselves formed from clouds of hot gas condensing into masses so great that nuclear fussion, the process in which hydrogen atoms are smashed together to for helium atoms, occures.

Answer 4

It isn't that the stars actually make those shapes, but that, seen from Earth, they have reminded people of different animals, heroes or objects. Sometimes clouds do that, but of course we know that clouds aren't bunnies or rhinoceros.

Because man could not explain a lot about the world around him, he made up stories to teach his family and neighbors about how to live. Many of those stories involved the woods, the ocean, the animals, the land and the skies. These were the things around them. These names and figures have been passed down since man first learned to tell stories.

The stars ~do~ sort of clump together though. The galaxies do too. Think about a dishpan full of soapy water. On the top, where all the big bubbles are pressed together, it looks sort of the way the galaxies are clumped together. (Now that is not something I'm positive about, but I'm pretty sure it's true.)

I hope someone can give you a more scientific answer, but I think the history of storytelling is pretty interesting too.

Answer 5

The stars only seem to have those formations because of the earth's relative position in space to them and the human imagination.

Answer 6

It is the result of our imagination and the observed relative position of these stars. As the stars move at different speeds and directions from one another, the constellations change appearance. Diffrent cultures have looked at these same stars and have come up with diffrent names and shapes for them due to their beliefs and imaginations.

Answer 7

The big bang... when something explodes, little clusters stay near eachother as they move outward... some of them even get closer together (gravitational force) while others drift farther apart. This has been going on for about 6 million years.

Answer 8

Our unique angle of view--and the unique connect-the-dot imagination of the founding astronomers

Answer 9

Our unique angle of view--and the unique connect-the-dot imagination of the founding astronomers

Answer 10

Nothing, the consetllations are results of human imagination.