Steve Willner wrote:
> In article <
8db3fb57-cf96-4fd8...@googlegroups.com>,
>
old...@yahoo.it writes:
>> So the positive and negative parallaxes have the same probability
>> to exis= t for not near stars
>
> If your measurement uncertainty is much larger than the true value of
> the quantity being measured, half the time the measured value will be
> negative. This is often useful in astronomy: the negative values
> tell you about the noise properties of your measurement. That's why
> the actual negative values are published rather than replaced by a
> non-quantitative "not detected."
Now that Hipparcos and Gaia are replacing old-fashioned measurements with
large refractors, it is slightly less an issue, but still very important.
A few decades ago, a colleague (the late Tom Lutz) was investigating bias
effects in parallax measurements, and came across a rubber stamp being used
at one observatory that said something like "parallax less than 0.040
arcsec, do not measure this plate". Thus a bias was introduced by ignoring
small or negative parallaxes, and the entire absolute magnitude scale was
skewed. Probably this was not the only such place with a bias against small
measured values.
--
Mike Dworetsky
(Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply)