From its unique vantage point 4.3 billion miles from Earth, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has captured images of nearby stars — and the stars appear to be in different positions than where we see them from Earth.
This is the first time this kind of “parallax effect” has been captured using a spacecraft. You can mimic this by holding a finger about an arm’s length from your face and see how it appears to jump when you close your left or right eye, according to a release by NASA.
“It’s fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth,” said planetary scientist Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in a statement.
“That has allowed us to do something that had never been accomplished before — to see the nearest stars visibly displaced on the sky from the positions we see them on Earth.”
New Horizons is on a course to interstellar space, much like the Voyager probes. It previously flew by Pluto and its moons in 2015 before conducting a flyby of the distant Kuiper Belt object,known asArrokoth, in January 2019.
In April, at a distance of 4.3 billion miles from Earth, New Horizons aimed its long-range telescopic camera to nearby stars Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359. They are still 4.2 and 7.795 light-years away from us, respectively.
Source – CNN
