Our Milky Way is a dynamic system - everything moves. Stars travel through space at speeds of tens to hundreds of kilometers per second! Even our Sun moves around the Galaxy as part of a grand cosmic carousel. As a result, the patterns of the constellations on the sky are ephemeral, and our local stellar neighborhood is always changing, as stars incessantly migrate in and out of our sight. Thanks to modern instruments - notably the European Space Agency's GAIA space telescope - astronomers have now measured the 3D spatial locations and 3D motion vectors of millions of stars within 3,000 light-years of the Sun. I will share with you this new 3D map of the nearby stars, and show some of the intricate and surprising patterns that are revealed when studying their collective and individual motions. We will see that stars are all indefatigable travelers, and that stars currently near the Sun in fact come from very diverse locations in the Milky Way, with a wide variety and ages and origins.
(http://astro.gsu.edu/~jrob/).
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