{"id":17686,"date":"2020-06-11T19:19:49","date_gmt":"2020-06-11T11:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/five-years-after-pluto-encounter-new-horizons-probe-does-a-far-out-parallax-experiment\/"},"modified":"2020-06-11T19:19:49","modified_gmt":"2020-06-11T11:19:49","slug":"five-years-after-pluto-encounter-new-horizons-probe-does-a-far-out-parallax-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/five-years-after-pluto-encounter-new-horizons-probe-does-a-far-out-parallax-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"Five years after Pluto encounter, New Horizons probe does a far-out parallax experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Brian
Queen guitarist (and astrophysicist) Brian May, a member of the New Horizons science team, uses his patented OWL viewer to check out the stereo images of Proxima Centauri that he created by combining pictures from Earth-based telescopes and the New Horizons spacecraft. (Photo courtesy of Brian May, via New Horizons \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI \/ NASA)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA\u2019s New Horizons probe has measured the distance to nearby stars using a technique that\u2019s as old as the ancient mariners, but from a vantage point those mariners could only dream of.<\/p>\n

The experiment, conducted on April 22-23 as the spacecraft zoomed 4.3 billion miles out from Earth, produced the farthest-out parallax observations ever made.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth,\u201d principal investigator Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said today in a news release. \u201cAnd that has allowed us to do something that had never been accomplished before \u2014 to see the nearest stars visibly displaced on the sky from the positions we see them on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

The parallax effect is akin to the method that mariners use to determine their position by triangulation with a sextant. You can determine the distance to an object if you sight it from different locations separated by a known distance, or baseline, and take note of the shift in angular position.<\/p>\n

Scientists have long used parallax to determine the distance to other stars, by carefully measuring the ever-so-slight shift in the star\u2019s position against the stellar background when viewed from different spots in Earth\u2019s orbit.<\/p>\n

For the April experiment, New Horizons\u2019 camera captured images of two of the closest stars beyond our solar system, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359. Those images were then compared with views of the same stars as seen from observatories in Australia and Arizona.<\/p>\n

\"Proxima
This animated image blinks back and forth between New Horizons and Earth views of the star Proxima Centauri. (JHUAPL \/ SwRI \/ NASA \/ Las Cumbres Observatory)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The stellar parallax effect would be too subtle to be seen by the human eye from different locations in Earth\u2019s orbit, where the maximum baseline is 186 million miles. But the differences were obvious in the pictures taken by New Horizons.<\/p>\n

New Horizons science team member Tod Lauer, an astronomer at the National Science Foundation\u2019s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, coordinated the parallax demonstration. \u201cThe New Horizons experiment provides the largest parallax baseline ever made \u2014 over 4 billion miles \u2014 and is the first demonstration of an easily observable stellar parallax,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Brian May, who\u2019s an astrophysicist and stereo-imagery specialist on the New Horizons team as well as the lead guitarist on the legendary rock band Queen, created stereo versions of the parallax images.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese photographs of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 \u2014 stars that are well-known to amateur astronomers and science-fiction aficionados alike \u2014 employ the largest distance between viewpoints ever achieved in 180 years of stereoscopy,\u201d May said.<\/p>\n

\"Wolf
This animated image blinks back and forth between New Horizons and Earth views of the star Wolf 359. (JHUAPL \/ SwRI \/ NASA \/ Mt. Lemmon Observatory)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Stern said the experiment provided a novel confirmation of the distances to the two stars. \u201cWe\u2019re not actually getting better information,\u201d he told GeekWire. \u201cWe\u2019re just doing it the old-fashioned way.\u201d<\/p>\n

The parallax experiment also served as a warmup for the fifth anniversary of New Horizons\u2019 flyby of Pluto on July 14. Stern said he expects to get an early start to the celebration, so as not to conflict with the buildup for the launch of NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover to Mars later next month.<\/p>\n

After the Pluto flyby in 2015, New Horizons went on to get close-up observations of Arrokoth, a snowman-shaped icy object farther out on the edge of the solar system. Stern and his colleagues are still sifting through the data that\u2019s being sent back in the wake of the Arrokoth encounter on New Year\u2019s Day of 2019 \u2014 and considering still more targets for observation.<\/p>\n

The New Horizons science team will answer questions about the mission, imaging and deep-space exploration during an AskScience AMA session on Reddit, starting at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT) Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Queen guitarist (and astrophysicist) Brian May, a member of the New Horizons science team, uses his patented OWL viewer to check out the stereo images of Proxima Centauri that he created by combining pictures from Earth-based telescopes and the New Horizons spacecraft. (Photo courtesy of Brian May, via New Horizons \/ JHUAPL \/ SwRI \/ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2786,4809,2174,4810,3621],"class_list":["post-17686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-brian-may","tag-nasa-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons","tag-new-horizons-probe","tag-proxima-centauri"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17686"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}