As the universe expands, do the star constellations become less easy to determine?

Question

If so, may we one day no longer see any at all?
Or is there even a chance that one day, new constellations may form due to the stars moving into different "positions" in the night sky?
Incidentally; how fast are the stars moving "apart" from one-another???

Answer 1

The Universe is expanding, but individual galaxies are not expanding. So the stars within a galaxy aren't getting farther apart from each other. Similarly, our solar system is not expanding (many people get confused about all that).

In fact, even galaxies within a cluster of galaxies aren't moving apart from each other - for example, the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are moving *towards* each other, and will collide in a few billion years. It's the clusters of galaxies that are moving away from each other.

Even though the galaxy itself isn't expanding, the stars are all moving relative to each other. They all rotate the center of the galaxy, and they also have random motions. So (as other people above have said) the constellations as we see them today will change - their shapes will become more and more distorted over time. Here's a neat website which shows what the Big Dipper will look like in the future: http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/help/proper.html

Answer 2

The actual expanding of the universe has little effect on the patterns of stars we see in the night sky. The motion of the stars themselves moving through our galaxy is more likely to distort the constellations. But yes, if the expansion keeps up it is likely that there will be a point in time where no stars are visible from Earth, however this won't be for an extremely long time. Far before that, the constellations will change and "new" ones will form, because all stars are in motion relative to Earth. All the stars have a different rate of motion, there is no real average.

Answer 3

Not really. While galaxies are flying away from each other, the stars in each galaxy are staying in that galaxy. All the stars you can see without a telescope are in our own galaxy, and are not flying away from us. However, the stars are moving within our galaxy as they and the Sun orbit the center of the galaxy, in a similar way that the planets orbit the Sun. So that will make the constellations change over time, but it takes on the order of 100,000 years for the changes to become noticeable. The stars may be moving fast by everyday standards, like hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, but they are many trillions of miles away, so they seem to almost be standing still to us.

Answer 4

The constellations we are familiar with have been basically unchanged in the past two thousand years. In another thousand years or so, Polaris might not be exactly true north, but it'll still be close.

Given enough millenia, the constellations will change and new constellations will be formed. We won't see it, though. Hard to say what our descendants will call them since the names and shapes of our constellations still vary in the cultures we have today.

Answer 5

No.
No.
Using the relativity model, at an average speed: 112 KPH

Answer 6

yes but it takes 10,000's of years, and the movement it so slow the sky looks the same as it did in Roman times.... or if your not religious the cave man days