Distance in space is difficult because a dim star could just be a smaller dim star that's close, or a larger bright star that's far away. We have to use a lot o

Distance in space is difficult because a dim star could just be a smaller dim star that's close, or a larger bright star that's far away. We have to use a lot of clever tricks (standard candles paired with parallax calculations [1] in particular) just to get distances estimates. We can kind of do this for stars that are very close (relatively speaking), but at the scale of the universe - even measuring the distance to a distant galaxy has a substantial uncertainty factor, let alone the stars within that galaxy! [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder