How can triangulation be used to find out distance of Earth to nearby Star?

Question

How can triangulation be used to find out distance of Earth to nearby Star?

give me a real answer.

how do you USE triangulation

Answer 1

Parallax is the method that uses triangulation. The diameter of the earth's orbit around the sun is 186,000,000 miles. A "nearby" star can be observed twice six months apart, and it will seem to have moved against the background of "distant" stars. Trigonometry can then be used to estimate the distance to the nearby star.

The particular months of observation depend on the location of the star. First, you have to know in which month the star appears due south at midnight ("in opposition"). Then you make your two observations three months before and three months after. Of course, you have to wait until the following year to make your "three months earlier" observation.

You can see the parallax effect in your front yard. Stand in your front yard so that a telephone pole on your side of the street is slightly to the right of a telephone pole across the street. Now move to the right. The nearby pole will move to the left of the distant one.

Answer 2

Since the Earth orbit takes it from one side of the sun to the other in 6 month, you do have a fairly large base for a triangle, although the height of the triangle is indeed much longer. Taking a picture of a relatively nearby star against a background of much more distant ones, one could see some minute variations in the position of said nearer stars against the background ones, over the course of 6 months. Half of this apparent motion is called the star's parallax, and since a parallax of one second arc would be a good base unit, the distance an hypothetical star showing just that much apparent motion was called PARallax arc SECond, Parsec. No star is actually close enough to have a 1 second arc apparent motion, however. That turns out to be 3.26 light years, and the closest start to the solar system is 4.2 light years away. The method evidently quickly lose accuracy the further the star is, and cannot reliably work beyond 100 parsec distance.
You will get a nifty diagram that shows the triangulation method on the suggested link below.

Answer 3

Basically it is called parallax. When you look out the window of a car, closer objects seem to move faster then ones further away. The same idea can be applied to nearby stars. Take a picture of a star now, then another half a year (on the other side of Earth's orbit) from now. Then see how many degrees the star has moved. The closer it is, the more it will seem to shift, the further away, the less it will seem to shift. The diameter between the earth's orbit = 2 AU's. Now basically you want to imagine a triangle between the two points on the earth's orbit that you took the pictures of the star at, and the star. To find the distance, you need chop the triangle in half, so you end up with 1AU and half the degrees you got from the shift in the photos of the star. Now all you need to do is apply some trig equation and you got it.

The distance to the star = 1AU / tan(half the angle of shift observed by the star in your photos).

Answer 4

There are no nearby stars! Besides the sun, the closest star to us is 4.3 light years away! That's like 17 trillion miles.

Answer 5

This is a basic trigonometry problem.