NASA's New Horizons mission has traveled so far that it now has a unique view of the nearest stars. So much so that he has sent us, for the first time, images of the sky from so far away that some stars They appear to be in different positions than we would see from Earth.
New Horizons
New Horizons was about 7,000 million kilometers from Earth, where a radio signal, traveling at the speed of light, needed just under 6 hours and 30 minutes to arrive.
From April 22 to 23, the spacecraft turned its long-range telescopic camera on a pair of the "closest" stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359. It explains Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado:
It's fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, different from what we see from Earth. And that has allowed us to do something that has never been achieved before: see the closest stars visibly displaced in the sky from the positions we see them on Earth.
For 3D glasses: These anaglyph images can be viewed with red-blue stereo glasses to reveal the distance of stars from their backgrounds. On the left is Proxima Centauri and on the right is Wolf 359. According to Todd Lauer, member of the New Horizons science team:
The New Horizons experiment provides the largest parallax baseline ever created, and is the first demonstration of readily observable stellar parallax.
The complementary images of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 were provided by the Las Cumbres Observatory, operating a remote telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.
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The news
For the first time, a spacecraft has sent images of an extraterrestrial sky where the stars are in other positions
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
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