how it's possible to measure the time distance of other stars or planets to Earth when we don't know spatial?

Answer 1

There are a couple of techniques to calculate the distance of a star to earth. Parallax & Red Shift. With the Parallax, you take two pictures of a star 6 months appart (preferably in the solstices). Since the pictures are taken in differents points of view when you superimpose the pictures, the star would have 'moved', using some old fashioned trigonometry you can calculate the distance judging by how much it moved.
Parallax is great for shorter distances though. For longer distances you do a Red Shift Analysis.
When you 'burn' elements, the emit very specific wavelenghts of light. If you pass that light through a prism you'll get a 'rainbow effect' but it will have vey distinct black lines in it at different intervals. When you analyse star light with this technique you can accurately describe the chemical composition af a star. When light travels very long distances these lines 'move' towards the red spectrum of the rainbow (but their spacing remains the same) by calculating how much they shift we can say how long that light has travelled.

Answer 2

Another technque can be used to determine the distance to a certain class of star. A Cepheid variable is a star that varies its luminosity over a very regular pattern. The actual luminosity can be determined by observing the timing pattern of the change in brightness. Once the luminosity is determined, it is a simple matter to calculate the distance to the star, and to the cluster or galaxy that contains that star.

Answer 3

I would like to note that using a spectral red/blue shift analysis of single stars is not likely to tell you anything about how far away they are from us. Hubble's law (using redshifts to approximate distance) only works when galaxies are in the Hubble flow, otherwise known as really really far away. Astronomers have A LOT of methods of finding distances to stars. Most of the common ones were listed above.

Answer 4

Red shift/ Blue shift can be used to calculate speed of recession or approach.

Distance is measured by triangulation of received signals from the same target to three distinct locations on the Earth's surface facing the target.

Such measurements can be taken by radio telescopes across the globe. The largest individual radio telescope is the RATAN-600 (Russia) with 576 meter diameter of circular antenna (RATAN-600 description). Other two individual radio telescopes at Pushchino Radio Astronomy Observatory, Russia, designed specially for the low frequency observations, are between the largest in their class. LPA (LPA description (in Russian)) is 187 x 384 m size phased array meridional radio telescope, and DKR-1000 is 1000 x 1000 m cross radio telescope (DKR-1000 description (in Russian) ). The largest radio telescope in Europe is the 100 meter diameter antenna in Effelsberg, Germany, which also was the largest fully steerable telecope for 30 years until the Green Bank Telescope was opened in 2000 (my personal favorite). The largest radio telescope in the United States until 1998 was Ohio State University's The Big Ear.

Other well known disk radio telescopes include the Arecibo radio telescope located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, which is steerable within about 20° of the zenith and is the largest single-aperture telescope (cf. multiple aperture telescope) ever to be constructed, and the fully steerable Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank in the United Kingdom. A typical size of the single antenna of a radio telescope is 25 metre, dozens of radio telescopes with comparable sizes are operated in radio observatories all over the world.


The Very Large Array, one of the world's premier astronomical radio observatories, consists of 27 radio antennas in a Y-shaped configuration on the Plains of San Agustin fifty miles west of Socorro, New Mexico. Each antenna is 25 meters (82 feet) in diameter. The data from the antennas is combined electronically to give the resolution of an antenna 36km (22 miles) across, with the sensitivity of a dish 130 meters (422 feet) in diameter.

Answer 5

Yes. The distance of stars is measured by their red shift. A tendency toward appearing with a greater red-shift in the color spectrum. The greater the shift, the further the body.

Answer 6

I'm not sure I completely understand your question, but there are several ways astronomers measure the distance to celestial objects --

TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAX -- distances up to 326 light years

SPECTROSCOPIC PARALLAX -- distances up to 163,084 light years

CEPHEID VARIABLES -- distances up to 130,467,522 light years

RED SHIFT -- distances up to 500 mega parsecs (..1 mega parsec = 3,261,688.071 light years

To learn more about each method, do a Google search...