Stellarium

Why does Stellarium say the quasar 3C 273 (HIP 60936) is 908 ly away?

Asked by stefan krieger

When I search for the quasar 3C 273 (aka HIP 60936) in Stellarium, I find HIP 60936. It has the right J2000 location and magnitude for 3C 273. But Stellarium lists HIP 60936 as having a parallax and says it is 908 ly away. What's going on?

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Bogdan Marinov (daggerstab) said : 		#1

I don't know. It may be a bug in the star catalogue, it may be a variable overflow in Stellarium itself. I will file a bug report.

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Matthew Gates (matthew-porpoisehead) said : 		#2

The Hipparcos catalogue lists this object as having a parallax of 3.59 mas, from which the distance is computed. If there is an error with this data, it is in the source catalogue.

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Randall Clague (rclague) said : 		#3

The 3.59 mas value for 3C 273's (aka HIP 60936) parallax is from the Hipparcos main catalog published in 1997. The parallax standard error, the scatter in the measurement, is 6.07 mas. The scatter in the measurement is larger than the measurement itself, a sure sign that the measurement is not accurate enough to be useful.

In the 2007 update to the Hipparcos catalog, the listed parallax for HIP 60936 is -1.48 mas, indicating that the object is more than infinitely far away, which is obviously nonphysical. The 2007 parallax standard error is 5.90 mas, also larger than the measurement, also indicating that the object is too far away for its parallax to be accurately measured by the instruments available.

http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-S?HIP%2060936

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