How would I find the distance of a star in parsecs and light years if parallax is known? For example, Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, has a parallax of 0.379 arcsec. What is its distance in parsecs? In light years?

Question

10579 views around the world

You can reuse this answer
Creative Commons License

Answer 1 · 2018-05-22T22:59:24

The distance to the star #= 1/.379=2.638# parsecs.

#1# parsec #= 3.26# light years

So, the distance to the star:

#3.26*2.638= 8.6# light years

Astro Princeton Edu