Stellar Drift
400,000 years from now, our night sky will look rather different, whilst our star circles the Milky Way, the other stars do too, but not necessarily at the same speed or in the same path.
ESA have mapped all stars within 325 light years of our Sun and pressed fast forward over 400,000 years to show the drift of all the stars.
You’ll notice a fair number of them are travelling in very different directions, and that’s partially because of the way each stars birth gives it a unique orbit around the galaxy, some are ejected from their nebula’s and even fly straight out of the galaxy, while many stars born in the same nebulas retain similar paths around the galaxy throughout their lives, offering a hint to stars that come from the same source.
Other groups of stars may even have begun life in another galaxy, one that merged with out galaxy billions of years ago, and now they circle the galaxy at completely different angles to the majority of stars, arcing over the top and under the main disk, rather than following the rest.
On the human level, the stars appear fixed in pace, eternal and never changing, but there are a few stars that observably are moving, the fastest ones in the above image.
Barnards Star for example has the fastest apparent movement (proper motion), but that’s because at 6 light years from us, it’s one of the closest stars, so it appears to be moving quickly, while much faster moving stars 1000′s of light years away barely move at all. Barnards star moves only a quarter of a degree in a human life time (about half a full moon), but sadly it’s too dim to see with the human eye.
Source : https://www.livescience.com/gaia-map-40000-stars.html
