Origination of Name
The phrase originated in classical antiquity, when astronomers and natural philosophers divided the lights in the sky into two groups. One group contained the fixed stars, which appear to rise and set but keep the same relative arrangement over time. The other group contained the naked eye planets, which they called wandering stars. (The Sun and Moon were sometimes called planets as well.) The planets seem to move and change their position over short periods of time (weeks or months). They always seem to move within the band of stars called the zodiac by Westerners. The planets can also be distinguished from fixed stars because stars tend to twinkle, while planets appear to shine with a steady light.
The star catalogue compiled by Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE lists 1,022 fixed stars visible from Alexandria. This became the standard number of stars in Western culture for hundreds of years. The total number of stars visible to the naked eye is about 6,000; only about half are visible at a given time of night from a given point on the Earth. They are all stars in the Milky Way, and they are actually at different distances from us. Most of the millions of stars in the Milky Way can only be detected with the aid of telescopes, or their existence indirectly inferred, because they are too faint or are obscured by interstellar gas, dust and other foreground stars.
Read more about this topic: Fixed Stars