Space Stories - Parallax: Measuring the Cosmos

Hosted by Richard Drumm, our Editor.


The word of the day today is parallax! Specifically stellar
parallax.


So what’s parallax & what does it mean to astronomers? As it
happens, I was part of the UVA Parallax team in the early 1980s.
Best part-time job ever! So for once I might know a little bit
about what I’m talking about! I’ll do my best to describe it so
you can understand the science.


 


An easy method to help grasp the concept is for you to hold out
your thumb at arm’s length and close one eye, then the other,
switching back & forth between them while looking at your
thumb. The location of your thumb seems to shift with each eye’s
view. If your, uh, thumb was 20 feet away from your eye, the
shift would be much less. You can measure the baseline, the
distance between your eyes and, using a little trigonometry
calculate the distance to your thumb. Simple! 


 


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