19.2 Surveying the stars

Learning objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Understand the concept of triangulating distances to distant objects, including stars
• Explain why space-based satellites deliver more precise distances than ground-based methods
• Discuss astronomers’ efforts to study the stars closest to the Sun

It is an enormous step to go from the planets to the stars. For example, our Voyager 1 probe, which was launched in 1977, has now traveled farther from Earth than any other spacecraft. As this is written in 2016, Voyager 1 is 134 AU from the Sun. To have some basis for comparison, the dwarf planet Pluto orbits at an average distance of 40 AU from the Sun, and the dwarf planet Eris is currently roughly 96 AU from the Sun. The nearest star, however, is hundreds of thousands of AU from Earth. Even so, we can, in principle, survey distances to the stars using the same technique that a civil engineer employs to survey the distance to an inaccessible mountain or tree—the method of triangulation .

Triangulation in space

A practical example of triangulation is your own depth perception. As you are pleased to discover every morning when you look in the mirror, your two eyes are located some distance apart. You therefore view the world from two different vantage points, and it is this dual perspective that allows you to get a general sense of how far away objects are.

To see what we mean, take a pen and hold it a few inches in front of your face. Look at it first with one eye (closing the other) and then switch eyes. Note how the pen seems to shift relative to objects across the room. Now hold the pen at arm’s length: the shift is less. If you play with moving the pen for a while, you will notice that the farther away you hold it, the less it seems to shift. Your brain automatically performs such comparisons and gives you a pretty good sense of how far away things in your immediate neighborhood are.

If your arms were made of rubber, you could stretch the pen far enough away from your eyes that the shift would become imperceptible. This is because our depth perception fails for objects more than a few tens of meters away. In order to see the shift of an object a city block or more from you, your eyes would need to be spread apart a lot farther.

Let’s see how surveyors take advantage of the same idea. Suppose you are trying to measure the distance to a tree across a deep river ( [link] ). You set up two observing stations some distance apart. That distance (line AB in [link] ) is called the baseline . Now the direction to the tree (C in the figure) in relation to the baseline is observed from each station. Note that C appears in different directions from the two stations. This apparent change in direction of the remote object due to a change in vantage point of the observer is called parallax    .

Triangulation.