As New Horizon’s principal investigator explained, the space probe effectively allowed us to “see the nearest stars visibly displaced on the sky from the positions we see them on Earth”.
It turns out that the images recently snapped by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have revealed that it got so far away from our planet that it essentially sees space differently than the observers back home, space.com reports.
According to the media outlet, as the spacecraft photographed stars Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, scientists compared the pictures to the images of those very same stars captured by two ground-based telescopes and noticed that said stars occupy “slightly different patches of sky than they do from our perspective here on Earth”.
The photos in question were taken by New Horizons on 22 and 23 April, when the craft was over 6.9 billion kilometers away from our planet.
And it turns out that when the stars’ images taken by the probe and the images snapped by telescopes on Earth are overlaid, it appears as if the stars “jump”, with the media outlet noting that it showcases a “parallax effect”.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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