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Stellar parallax is the apparent shift of position of any nearby star (or other object) against the background of distant stars. By extension, it is a method for determining the distance to the star through trigonometry, the stellar parallax method .
A parsec is the distance from the Sun to an astronomical object that has a parallax angle of one arcsecond (not to scale). The parsec (symbol: pc) is a unit of length used to measure the large distances to astronomical objects outside the Solar System, approximately equal to 3.26 light-years or 206,265 astronomical units (AU), i.e. 30.9 trillion kilometres (19.2 trillion miles).
Bradley discovered the stellar aberration, proving the relative motion of the Earth. Bessel proved that the parallax of a star was greater than zero by measuring the parallax of 0.314 arcseconds of a star named 61 Cygni. In the same year Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve and Thomas Henderson measured the parallaxes of other stars, Vega and Alpha ...
Stellar parallax motion from annual parallax. Half the apex angle is the parallax angle. Parallax is an angle subtended by two lines crossing a point. In the upper diagram, the Earth (blue-filled circle) in its orbit sweeps the parallax angle subtended on the Sun (yellow-filled circle).
Concept art for the TAU spacecraft, a 1980s era study which would have used an interstellar precursor probe to expand the baseline for calculating stellar parallax in support of Astrometry. The history of astrometry is linked to the history of star catalogues , which gave astronomers reference points for objects in the sky so they could track ...
The lower diagram shows the equal angle swept by the Sun in a geostatic model. A similar diagram can be drawn for a star except that the angle of parallax would be minuscule. The most important fundamental distance measurements in astronomy come from trigonometric parallax, as applied in the stellar parallax method. As the Earth orbits the Sun ...
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Distance measurements in astronomy have historically been and continue to be confounded by considerable measurement uncertainty. In particular, while stellar parallax can be used to measure the distance to nearby stars, the observational limits imposed by the difficulty in measuring the minuscule parallaxes associated with objects beyond our galaxy meant that astronomers had to look for ...