"Paul Schlyter" wrote in message ...
In article ,
Henri Wilson HW@....... wrote:

Sure, they're a long way from us...

That's the answer to your question; the so-called "fixed" stars appear
relatively fixed because of their vast distances to us. While light
takes one second to travel to the Moon, 8 minutes to the Sun, one and
a half hour to Saturn and some 5 hours to Neptune, light takes more
than 4 years to travel to the *nearest* star, and hundreds of years or
more to travel to the average star visible to the naked eye in our
skies. That's a big difference!

but there are a great many out there in our galaxy and every object
must be in orbit around a mass centre of some kind.

Indeed true: all the stars we see with the naked eye in our skies
belong to our galaxy, and they are all orbiting the center of our
galaxy with an orbital speed of some 200 to 300 km/s. That's some six
to ten times faster than the orbital speed of the Earth around the
Sun, but the stars are vastly more distant than just some six to ten
times the distance to the Sun. Therefore they appear to move much much
slower.

Most do not appear to have moved much in thousands of years.
Should we not expect to see more movement than we do?

Why should we expect what does not happen?

Mankind saw for many thousands of years that the stars didn't appear
to move much relative to one another, with the exception of 7 bodies
which were called planets (= "wandering stars"): Sun, Moon, Mercury,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. The weekdays were named after the
planets and that's why we have a 7-day week. Now, since mankind had
known for a very long time that this was the case, why should we
"expect" anything different? The reason for this (i.e. the vast
distances to the stars) was found out much later though - ancient man
believed the "fixed" stars were just a little farther away than
Saturn.


...my question may be naive and the answer trivial... so please
enlighten me.

Hopefully done....


Henri thinks stars are 0.3 LY from us to fit his theory.