Objects in mirror are closer that they appear

This is what science does so well, reconsider, recalculate, reassess. The desire of those fundamentalists to declare this process indecisive or changeable exposes their own inability to understand.

The most accurate catalogue of the distances to more than 100,000 stars has just been released.

Cambridge astronomer Dr Floor van Leeuwen has spent the past 10 years checking and recalculating data gathered by the Hipparcos satellite.

It collected the information in the 1990s, but questions were raised about apparent errors in the results.

Dr van Leeuwen, who saw a flaw in the way Hipparcos worked, has now corrected the star distances.

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"The discovery of the problem with the satellite left me with no option but to recalculate the data," Dr van Leeuwen explained. "I knew that it could be done and I knew that the existing data could be significantly improved in all aspects, so I had no choice.

"It was an extremely painful process. You can spend a whole weekend examining one small part of the data, and making the resultant corrections can take two weeks. But the result is that we now have a catalogue more accurate than ever before, and one in which we know that all the calculations work."

Ultimately, Hipparcos' astrometric data has altered our view of the cosmos. Its distance scale found the Universe to be bigger and younger than some thought.