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The distance is found by measuring the Parallax, which is the small amount that alpha centauri seems to move backwards and forwards, against the general background of distant stars, as the Earth goes round the Sun.
For a long time - until 1838 - no parallax had been detected for any star, which was used by many people as a good reason why the Earth did not move at all. But in that year Friedrich Bessel measured the parallax for a star for the first time, confirming the Earth's movement.
The problem was that there was parallax all along but it was so small it had never been detected for any star. After Bessel's measurements people started to realise how unimaginably distant the stars really are.
Bessel's famous measurement was done on the star 61 Cygni, which is further than alpha centauri, but people soon started looking for parallax in other stars.
The parallax of alpha centauri is 0.77 arc-seconds, so its distance in parsecs is 1/0.77, or 1.3, which is 4.3 light-years.
What else can I help you with?
What is farther from Earth Alpha centauri or the sun?
That's actually an easy calculation, if you state the problem correctly. Alpha Centauri is about 4.5 light years away. There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365.24 days in a year. Multiply all those numbers together to find out how many light-seconds it is to Alpha Centauri. The Moon is about 1.5 light seconds away, so divide by that to get the ratio.
What is the next closet star besides the sun?
The nearest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri (Alpha Centauri C). You will find a list of other nearby stars at: http://casswww.ucsd.edu/public/nearest.html
Can you see Alpha Centauri A from earth?
Arcturus is about 37 light years from us. Earth would not be visible from that distance. Voyager 1 took a photograph of Earth at a distance of 6.1 billion kilometres (0.00064478428 light years) and it appears as a single pixel.
Where do you find the advanced defense platform station plan in broken mirror plan?
Alpha Centauri, top left corner of your map, bought from Earth Starbase for about 25000 bars of latnium.
How do you find the distance between 5 cities?
First, you have to specify what cities you want to find the distance between, and then you can find the distance between each one, and finally add all the distance together, to give you the total.
Distance between Dubai and other UAE cities?
find the distance between the Dubai cities
How do you find a midpoint of coordinates?
how do you find distance between points
How the distance between two cities was measured and is measured now?
The distance between the countries can be find by travelling
How do you find distance between points?
ruler
How do you find the minimum distance between two targets?
The perpendicular distance is the shortest.
How do you find the driving distance between cities?
You can get distance and hours and directions from Mapquest.com
How do you find the distance between two integers using the difference?
The difference (greater minus lesser) is the distance between them.
