The answer is just plain old geometry. Hold out your hand at arm’s length. Close one eye. Now open that eye and close the other. Your hand will seem to move against the background. Your two eyes and your hand form a long triangle. If you know the distance between your eyes and the angle by which your hand moved against the background, you can calculate the length of your arm. The angle by which your hand moves is called the parallax.
Of course, you wouldn’t measure your arm this way. But now make the triangle much bigger. Instead of your two eyes as the base of the triangle, have those two points be Earth on opposite sides of the Sun. If you then take pictures of a star, if the star is close enough, it will move relative to background stars just like your hand moved relative to your surroundings. Knowing the parallax angle the star moved and the size of Earth’s orbit, you can calculate the distance to the star.
Measuring this distance is no small feat. The parallax angle by which even the closest stars shift is very small. For Proxima Centauri, it’s 0.77 arc second. An arc second is 1/3,600 of a degree. If you hold one of your hairs about 10 meters (or 33 feet) away, the hair covers an angle of 1 arc second. It wasn’t until 1838 that astronomers were able to measure such small angles. In that year, Friedrich Bessel measured the parallax of 61 Cygni as 0.314 arc second, or 11.4 light-years.
Fun fact: A star with a parallax of 1 arc second would be 3.26 light-years away. This distance became known as the “parallactic second,” or parsec for short.
Read the original article on britannica.com.
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