His catalogue was extended to about 6,000 stars by Louise Freeland Jenkins in 1952, and to over 8,000 stars by William van Altena in 1995. In 1924, American astronomer Frank Schlesinger published a catalogue with the parallaxes of almost 2,000 stars, probing stellar distances out to a few dozen light-years from Earth. Over the following decades, astronomers, aided by the improvements in telescope technology gradually grew the catalogs of stellar distances using the parallax method. By the early 20th century, the list of stars with measured parallaxes grew to a few hundred, mostly thanks to the work of Dutch astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn. In the late 1830s, Bessel’s contemporaries and rivals Wilhelm Struve and Thomas Henderson provided one parallax measurement each, bringing the total number to three. This was the beginning of the long and tedious process of building a three-dimensional map of the universe. Based on his observations, Bessel calculated that the star 61 Cygni, one of the stars in the Cygnus constellation, must be about 10 light-years away from Earth. The first person to succeed at measuring the distance to a star using the parallax method was German astronomer Friedrich Bessel in 1838. Cassini subsequently used those measurements to compute the parallax determining Mars' distance from Earth. In 1672, Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini and his colleague Jean Richer made simultaneous observations of Mars, with Cassini in Paris and Richer in French Guiana. The ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus reportedly used observations of a solar eclipse from two different locations to calculate the distance of Earth's celestial companion. The first known astronomical measurement using parallax didn't involve a star but the moon. That means it can measure, to within 20 percent accuracy, the distances of stars that lie tens of thousands of light-years away.The history of parallax measurements in astronomy The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, currently underway, can measure parallax angles of just a few millionths of an arcsecond. That’s why a parsec has that value, and not any other.Īlthough astronomers often measure distant objects in parsecs or megaparsecs (1 megaparsec is 1 million parsecs), only nearby objects have parallaxes that we can actually measure. And a parsec is the distance - 3.26 light-years - that a star must lie from the Sun for its parallax angle to be exactly 1″. The two different sightlines, one at each end of Earth’s orbit, create a triangle the parallax angle is defined as half the angle at the triangle’s apex. If you draw a simple diagram, you’ll see that the distance the star appears to move is related to the angle at which it is viewed. Translated to the stars in the sky, two photographs of the same nearby star taken six months apart will show it appearing to move against the background of more distant stars because Earth has moved to the other side of the Sun in its orbit. Your finger will appear to shift because each eye views it from a slightly different angle. Next, open your left eye and close your right. Close just your left eye and observe where your finger appears against the background.

One of the simplest ways to see for yourself how this works is to hold your hand at arm’s length in front of your face and raise one finger. This is because as our planet moves, our viewpoint changes. Over the course of several months, nearby stars appear to move with respect to more distant objects - an effect called parallax.

Earth circles the Sun, making one complete orbit per year. Question: Why is a parsec 3.26 light-years and not some other number?Īnswer: A parsec, or “parallax second,” is defined as 3.26 light-years because of how it is measured.

Parallax definition for dummies