Ever thought that the entire sky might just be an illusion. Well, it is not exactly true as word by word. But new research shows something in the same heights. NASA recently captured the picture of nearby stars using the New Horizons spacecraft. The result was amazing.
The spacecraft send some spectacular images of near field stars and they will blow your mind. The images come from a distance of almost 4.3 billion miles away from Earth in space. This is the first solid evidence of the “parallax effect” captured by a spacecraft. The entire phenomenon explains why we see stars in a different position from Earth even though they are in separate places on space.
Our @NASANewHorizons spacecraft explored Pluto and recently took images of stars from its unique vantage point of over 4 billion miles from Earth.
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NASA New Horizons spacecraft explains space parallax
The New Horizons spacecraft normally observes a sky that we may as well say is different from ours. Alan Stern, Planetary scientists behind the New Horizons project, says that space parallax effect is actually not that uncommon. Previously many astronauts saw that there was something funny going on in the way they saw stars across the universe. This is mainly due to a stereoscopic parallax effect.
More than 4 billion miles from Earth & speeding toward interstellar space, @NASANewHorizons is humankind’s farthest photographer, imaging an alien sky. Why does the spacecraft now “see” stars in a different place in the sky than on Earth? Find out: https://t.co/5SoIPDGoUK @JHUAPL pic.twitter.com/NgsDrqQzDm
— Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) June 11, 2020
The stars appeared to be in different locations through the parallax effect, meaning that the stars seemed to shift against the background since New Horizons was viewing it from a different viewpoint. Scientists use the parallax effect to measure the distances to stars.
Stars, including our sun, are always moving. But we’re so far away from these stars and they move over such large time scales that it’s difficult to see this motion. “No human eye can detect these shifts,” Stern said. However, with the use of proper equipment one can clearly identify these differences.
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