Visualisations explore what the deep future holds for our night sky

A very basic yet, from our perspective, easy to overlook quality of the Universe is that everything is in motion, all the time. Even things that have united humanity across the ages and that we take for granted – such as the constellations and our relatively pristine view of the Milky Way on clear nights far from light pollution – will evolve and rupture over the course of deep timescales. In this video from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the US astronomer and curator Jackie Faherty discusses how the contours of the night sky as we know it will dramatically alter millions of years in the future. Her words are paired with extraordinary data visualisations of these coming distortions, some drawn from the show Encounters in the Milky Way, playing at the museum’s Hayden Planetarium.