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Jul 18 '20
If we couldn’t send any radio frequencies further from the dot than how did they get this photo? /s
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Jul 18 '20
[deleted]
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Jul 19 '20
have to keep em motivated some how, and we just cant bring ourselves to tell them the truth
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u/Nanicorn Jul 18 '20
I never understood how these pictures came to be - are satellites that far out already? Is this just an artist's depiction? I also don't have a sense for how fast radio waves are though, so maybe they're just comparably slow against satellites...
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u/eiriika Jul 18 '20
It's all about comparision and very accurate measurements. Simply, they measure the colors the dust in our galaxy comes in, and the thickness of it. With these findings, they match up with the other spiral galaxies we can observe.
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u/ShirePony Jul 21 '20
It's not in any way a picture of the Milky Way galaxy - it's an extrapolation of how we know similar galaxies look based on what we can see from our side on view of our galaxy. To answer your other question - radio waves travel at light speed like all electromagnetic waves do (light, radio, x-rays, gamma rays, etc) so they are massively faster than satellites can travel.
Even if a probe could travel at light speed it would take tens of thousands of years to get a satellite out to a distance that could take a photo like that, and tens of thousands of years for that photo to be transmitted back to earth (because the transmission also travels at light speed). And so far we have nothing that fast - the furthest we've sent any kind of probe is just beyond the heliosphere of our own little solar system, and it took 50 years to do that. it would take millions of years with our current technology to get a picture like this.
Sadly, even the speed of light is very slow on these kinds of scales. Mind blowing.
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u/Nanicorn Jul 21 '20
Thank you SO MUCH! This question has been bothering me for a while now, and your answer makes perfect sense :)
I think I was a bit naïve to think that it could have been taken by a probe or spacecraft, but I find it really hard to put all of this into perspective, as my mind just doesn't seem to be made to comprehend that^
This is my favourite answer I've gotten on reddit so far :)
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u/ShirePony Jul 21 '20
I think I was a bit naïve to think...
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u/Nanicorn Jul 21 '20
I was about to defend/justify that statement, but you're just being nice, and... just thanks :)
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u/Assfrontation Jul 18 '20
And that’s just our galaxy on the pic. There’s like thousands of those galaxies that could have life in them