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What constellation are we in?

beamer3.6m

By beamer3.6m
in The Astro Lounge

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Kaptain Klevtsov

Kaptain Klevtsov

Posted
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Whoever is out there looking at us, if there is anybody, will no doubt have their own mythology and names for their constellations, so we'll have to wait until we meet them to find out. Maybe we're even being viewed by more than one race. Then we'll end up with double barreled names maybe.

Kaptain Klevtsov

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themos

themos

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Whoever is out there looking at us, if there is anybody, will no doubt have their own mythology and names for their constellations, so we'll have to wait until we meet them to find out. Maybe we're even being viewed by more than one race. Then we'll end up with double barreled names maybe.

Except that Sol is too small to make a visual impact beyond the immediate neighbourhood. That's what I alluded to when I said that most visible stars are YOUNG. It would be true EVERYWHERE. Let's revel in our obscurity!

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adrastea

adrastea

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tangental thought: it would be quite an interesting mental exercise to take the distances to known nearby stars as determined through parallax, etc., and then visualise the whole thing in three-dimensional shapes rather than the 2D constellations. I suppose they could be plotted on a graph to see if the 3D shapes look like bizarre creatures, kind of like wire-frame models of three-headed beasts or the like. It would take some imagination, but I wonder what people would come up with?

PS I didn't think the original question was particularly silly, I just assumed it was about astrology (i.e., what constellation is the sun in now), but I suppose my fledgling astro-brain got miswired somewhere...

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themos

themos

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tangental thought: it would be quite an interesting mental exercise to take the distances to known nearby stars as determined through parallax, etc., and then visualise the whole thing in three-dimensional shapes rather than the 2D constellations. I suppose they could be plotted on a graph to see if the 3D shapes look like bizarre creatures, kind of like wire-frame models of three-headed beasts or the like. It would take some imagination, but I wonder what people would come up with?

PS I didn't think the original question was particularly silly, I just assumed it was about astrology (i.e., what constellation is the sun in now), but I suppose my fledgling astro-brain got miswired somewhere...

There's a nice picture in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars

600px-Nearby_Stars_%2814ly_Radius%29.svg.png

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coatesg

coatesg

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All stars have proper motion in one direction or another, and our galaxy as a whole rotates once about every 26 million years. That, may be modified by anyone who knows the correct orbital period. ;)

Think it's more like 200-250 million years - the "cosmic year". The stars, gas and dust all rotate around the galaxies at various rates (and from this you infer the "dark matter" in galaxies we can't detect), as well as oscillations about the disc of the galaxy and any interesting events like satellite galaxies disrupting things. Anyhow, I digress - sorry.

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The Warthog

The Warthog

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Does this mean I'm about to meet a tall dark stranger??

Ummm, that would be the hire-purchase thug after your scope. ;)

Actually, I did read that the Sun, along with many stars within 30 or so ly, were all formed in the same stellar cloud and were once part of an open cluster like M45.

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Astroman

Astroman

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Ron: Being off by a factor of ten is pretty good for astronomy. ;)

WH: Not sure where you read that, but it's incorrect. Whomever it was that said the Sun is older than the closest stars was correct, and therefore they are not related. Being ~5 billion years old, Sol has gone round the MW core 20 times or so, so the stars that formed with us have long since scattered. It's estimated an average open cluster will scatter in something like 10 to 20 million years.

This has been a great discussion, and most of the facts are right about Ursa Major and Hyades etc. Our position among the stars is indeterminate, and our perceived positions for them is due to our line of sight. A long time ago, (on a human scale), I ran into a program that would plot the stars in 3 dimensions, much as the Wiki entry above, and fly you around, much as Redshift and other programs do. It was a real eye opener how quickly the arrangement of the well known constellations changed with a modest change of our position.

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MartinB

MartinB

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Just had a look on Starry Night. Viewed from earth the sun is in Pisces at the mo and will be moving between aries and taurus. Don't know what constellation the sun is in looking from pluto though.

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The Warthog

The Warthog

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Don't know what constellation the sun is in looking from pluto though.

Orion, apparently. (Starry Night Pro again)

Kaptain Klevtsov

It says something about the scale of the universe that the constellations look exactly the same no matter what planet you are on, in our solar system. Vast, eh?

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barkis

barkis

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When astronomers fixed absolute magnitude of the stars, they chose 10 parsecs as the distance.

So, the absolute mag. is how bright a star would appear to us at that distance. 10 parsecs is roughly 30 light years give or take one or two. If we were to move out to that distance and look back at our sun, I very much doubt if it would be visible, let alone which constellation it would lie in. And anyway, the constellations, as named by the ancients, would bear no resemblance to anything we know at that distance. We would have to re name them.

Our sun is mag -27 as far as I know, does anyone know it's absolute magnitude off hand.?

Ron. ;)

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Astronut

Astronut

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As the stars that are nearest to us are Alpha Centauri and it's group of stars surely we are in the constellation of Centaurus !?!

Not really. The constellations are just arbitrary patterns of stars invented or imagined by us, the human race. The stars that form them have no connection to each other as far as clustering goes (with some exceptions eg. the Plough or the Hyades in Taurus). You have to remember that the stars that form these patterns are at different distances from us and just happen to lie in the same area of sky as seen from our solar system. If you were to try to find Orion from Alnitak (the left star in the belt) the constellation would'nt exist from that viewpoint. In fact, at that distance (about 800 light years), just about all the constellations we recognize from here would cease to exist.

If you were to travel to Alpha Centauri (a mere 4.5 light years from us), most of the constellations would in fact still be recognizable but with some distortions to the patterns. The further away you travel then the more distorted the patterns would appear. Even further out and we wouldn't see any of them and we'd have to invent new ones. Looking back from Alpha Centauri, our Sun would be a 0.5 mag star (according to SN Pro) in the constellation of Cassiopeia to the left of the 'W' (which wouldn't look much different).

[edit]

I've been playing around with SN Pro again and the viewpoint from Barnard's star (6.2 light years distance and in a completely different direction from Alpha Centauri) puts our Sun (magnitude +1) in the constellation of Orion (still easily recognisable) to the left of the belt stars with the belt pointing to it. Aren't visual aids wonderful ;)

[/edit]

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James

James

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Don't know what constellation the sun is in looking from pluto though.

Orion, apparently. (Starry Night Pro again)

Kaptain Klevtsov

KK's already done this. The thing to remember is that Pluto's orbit is inclined at quite a high angle to the ecliptic so the Sun won't necessarily appear to be in a zodiacal constellation.

James

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