The first stellar parallaxes revisited

Abstract

AbstractWe have reanalyzed the data used by Bessel, von Struve, and Henderson in the 1830s to measure the first parallax distances to stars. We can generally reproduce their results, although we find that von Struve and Henderson have underestimated some of their measurement errors, leading to optimistic parallax uncertainties. We find that temperature corrections for Bessel's measured positions are larger than anticipated, explaining some systematics apparent in his data. It has long been a mystery as to why von Struve first announced a parallax for Vega of 0.″125 only to later revise it to double that value using more data. We resolve this mystery by finding that von Struve's early result used two dimensions of position data, which independently give significantly different parallaxes but, when combined, only fortuitously give the correct result. With later data, von Struve excluded the “problematic” dimension, leading to the larger parallax value. Allowing for likely temperature corrections and using his data from both dimensions reduce von Struve's parallax for Vega to a value consistent with the correct value.