Parallax in astronomy

The most important fundamental distance measurements in astronomy come from trigonometric parallax, as applied in the stellar parallax method. As the Earth orbits the Sun, the position of nearby stars will appear to shift slightly against the more distant background. These shifts are angles in an isosceles triangle, with 2 AU (the distance between the extreme positions of Earth's orbit around the Sun) making the base leg of the triangle and the distance to the star being the long equal-length legs. The amount of shift is quite small, even for the nearest stars, measuring 1 arcsecond for an object at 1 parsec's distance (3.26 light-years), and thereafter decreasing in angular amount as the distance increases. Astronomers usually express distances in units of parsecs (parallax arcseconds); light-years are used in popular media. Because parallax becomes smaller for a greater stellar distance, useful distances can be measured only for stars which are near enough to have a parallax larger than a few times the precision of the measurement. In the 1990s, for example, the Hipparcos mission obtained parallaxes for over a hundred thousand stars with a precision of about a milliarcsecond, providing useful distances for stars out to a few hundred parsecs. The Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 has the potential to provide a precision of 20 to 40 microarcseconds, enabling reliable distance measurements up to for small numbers of stars. The Gaia space mission provided similarly accurate distances to most stars brighter than 15th magnitude. Distances can be measured within 10% as far as the Galactic Center, about 30,000 light years away. Stars have a velocity relative to the Sun that causes proper motion (transverse across the sky) and radial velocity (motion toward or away from the Sun). The former is determined by plotting the changing position of the stars over many years, while the latter comes from measuring the Doppler shift of the star's spectrum caused by motion along the line of sight.