Why the night sky you see is mostly a lie, and I mean that literally

Every star you can point to with your finger is showing you a version of itself that no longer exists in that exact form, because light takes time to travel and stars are far enough away that the delay is not trivial.

The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is about 4.3 light-years away — so what you're seeing tonight left it before your last birthday if you're in your mid-thirties or younger, actually a bit longer, over four years ago. Most of the bright stars in a typical constellation are tens to hundreds of light-years distant, meaning you are looking at light that departed before some of your grandparents were born.

A few stars in the night sky do not exist anymore at all, having ended their lives sometime in the centuries since their light left them, with the last of that light only now completing its journey to a telescope or an eye. We have no way to know which ones without decades of tracked observation, so every night sky is a mix of the present and a scattering of small, ordinary ghosts.

It is not a flaw in astronomy. It is astronomy's actual subject: we do not study the universe as it is, only as it was, at whatever distance we happen to be looking.