Back in 1878, the illustrious astronomer Simon Newcomb briefly commented on the spiny negative parallax issue, suggesting that “such a paradoxical result can arise only from errors of observation”. The negative stellar parallaxes appear to be a most inconvenient topic among astronomers - and one which has eluded any rational explanation to this day. In other words, nearby stars have regularly been observed to drift in the opposite direction the Copernican model predicts! Strangely, it is extremely hard to find mention of this in astronomy literature. Well, here’s the problem: it has been known for centuries that observational astronomers have kept detecting nearby stars exhibiting “negative parallax”. Therefore, they would always expect any stellar parallax shift (between closer and more distant stars) to exhibit what is known as positive parallax, since Earth’s motion around the Sun is certainly not believed to reverse direction!Ībove - A graphic from the Encyclopædia Britannica entry on “Parallax”.īelow - My graphic showing why no negative stellar parallax can exist in the Copernican model. Far more interesting to our present discourse is the fact that Copernican astronomers will obviously assume that they are moving in the same direction in relation to all stars at all times. Let us not dwell on the question of just how they determine how far those very distant fixed stars are meant to be. The techniques of astronomy by James Evans (2017) But the effect is so small (because the diameter of Earth’s orbit is tiny compared with the distance of even the nearest stars) that it had resisted all efforts at detection.” Since the acceptance of Copernicus’s moving Earth, astronomers had known that stellar parallax must exist. “The annual parallax is the tiny back-and-forth shift in the direction of a relatively nearby star, with respect to more-distant background stars, caused by the fact that Earth changes its vantage point over the course of a year. The Encyclopædia Britannica entry on stellar parallax continues: All of this reasoning is done under the assumption that Earth revolves around the Sun. Therefore, they figure that these recordings represent the baseline upon which they can perform a simple trigonometric calculation to determine the stars’ distances from Earth. Why six months? Well, Copernican astronomers assume that, in six months, Earth has changed positions by about 300 Million km, from one side of its orbit to the other. Six months later, they look at star “X” again and, if it has moved by any amount in relation to the distant stars, they call this apparent displacement the parallax of star X. They look at a given, nearby star “X” and record its position against far more distant stars. Confirmed by Ptolemy (2nd century AD), this understanding became common in medieval Europe and the Near East, although a few astronomers believed that the motion periodically reversed itself.”Ĭopernican astronomers measure the distance to the stars as follows. “Hipparchus of Nicaea (2nd century BC) is the first known astronomer to have made careful observations and compared them with those of earlier astronomers to conclude that the fixed stars appear to be moving slowly in the same general direction as the Sun.
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