Exercises

Betelgeuse as a parallax angle of 5.07 milliarcseconds. What is its distance?

Hipparcos was a satellite that operated between 1989 and 1993, designed to measure the parallax angles of over 100,000 stars. It had an unprecedented resolution of 0.001 arcseconds. What is the farthest distance a star could be at so that Hipparcos could still measure its distance using parallax? Compare this to Hubble, which has a resolution of 0.05 arcseconds.

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