New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe launched by NASA as a part of the New Frontiers program. It was launched on January 19, 2006. It is the first spacecraft to explore Pluto, first to explore the Kuiper Belt object ‘Arrokoth’. Now it has come up with its new first, Interstellar parallax experiment !!!
Parallax is the apparent change in the position of an object due to the change in observer’s position. The simplest way to understand the parallax effect is by holding your hand out in front of you and to look at it with the left eye closed, then the right eye closed. You will see that your hand appears to move against the background. Astronomers have long used this method to calculate the distances to stars.
As Earth moves around the Sun, the stars appear to have shifted their positions. But, because these stars are farther away than the diameter of Earth’s orbit, the parallax shifts cannot be detected with the human eye. They can only be measured with precise instrumentation.
On April 22-23, New Horizons turned its long range telescopic camera to a pair of the “closest” stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359.
“It’s fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth”,
said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.
When New Horizons stereoscopic images are paired with the pictures of the same stars taken on the same dates by telescopes on Earth, the parallax shift is instantly visible. This is the first demonstration of an interstellar parallax. Now Interstellar navigators can use this technique to establish their position in the galaxy.
At the time of the observations, New Horizons was more than 4.3 billion miles from the Earth. Here the radio signal travels with the same speed as that of the light and takes about 6 hours & 30 minutes to reach Earth. The New Horizons spacecraft continues to speed away from interstellar space. It will eventually leave the solar system to explore more of the outer space.
Reference: NASA
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