Suppose you could travel to Jupiter and observe changes in positions of nearby stars during one orbit of Jupiter around the Sun. Describe how those changes would be different from what we measure from Earth. How would your ability to measure the distances to stars be different from the vantage point of Jupiter?
Tags: Ability, Different, Distances, From, Jupiter, Measure, Point, Stars, Vantage, Would
Having a measuring source on Jupiter would give a much longer baseline for determining parallax based distances. However the communication between telescopes would have to be carefully coordinated because of the distance (It takes light 8 minutes to travel from sun to earth and Jupiter is much farther from earth than the sun is – but that is a surmountable problem). The real issue that makes it not feasible is that Jupiter is essentially entirely gas (There may be a small solid core.) so there is no place to put an observing station. The second insurmountable hurdle is that Jupiter’s gravity is more than 10 times greater than earth’s so humans could not survive on it and any equipment would be unusable. There are many better sites. A feasible station could be put on one of Jupiter’s moons. Jupiter has 12 major, and numerous minor moons many of which could be feasible base locations.
Another point. We have highly accurate measuring satellites in space and even more accurate ones in planning. See Astronomy.com and nasa.gov
The radius of Jupiter’s orbit is about 5 times that of the Earth’s. Hence a given star would show a parallax five times larger. As the parallax is proportional to 1/distance, it would mean that we would be able to measure parallaxes of stars that are further away.
You would be somewhat closer to or somewhat further away from whatever you are looking at.