The article reported "In 1543 the mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus asserted that the earth orbits the sun. This meant that people should be able to observe the apparent shift in the position of the nearest stars from different points in the earth’s orbit. But that had not been observed in the centuries that followed. The reason was, of course, that even the nearest stars are incredibly far away and the effect being looked for is very small. When the Royal Observatory was founded in 1820, it was equipped with the most accurate star position measuring devices available. Eleven years later Thomas Henderson used those devices to make the first believable measurements of this effect, known as “parallax”. By observing the angular “movement” of Alpha Centauri – still the second-closest star known to us – and knowing also the size of the earth’s orbit, this gave the distance to the star by simple trigonometry."
Stellar parallax prediction of Copernicus was claimed not to exist by Tycho Brahe and others so Copernicus, heliocentric solar system must be wrong, a long standing argument used against the heliocentric solar system. Indeed, it took a long time before telescopes could start to observe and measure the stellar parallax, e.g. 'Resolving long-standing mysteries about the first parallaxes in astronomy',
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-long-standing-mysteries-parallaxes-astronomy.html
Folks interested, I periodically use this site to look up info on stars and their parallaxes recorded.
http://simbad.harvard.edu/simbad/
This shows the stellar parallax for Alpha Centauri close to 742 mas (close to 1.35 pc distance from Earth). You can dig deeper and find GR2 data too for various stars. 1000 mas = 1 arcsecond. The stellar parallaxes of stars are < 1,000 mas or < 1 arcsecond.
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