eli5: How are we accurately able to study far off cosmic objects if our primary source of information is from light (that sometimes has traveled to us for 1000’s of years). Am I missing something?

Question

eli5: How are we accurately able to study far off cosmic objects if our primary source of information is from light (that sometimes has traveled to us for 1000’s of years). Am I missing something?

In: 8

Answer 1

Thousands of years is actually generally pretty inconsequential when we start talking about observing solar systems and planets. Not much changes quickly. There’s also the part where this is all we have, so the fact that it’s technically thousands of years old data isnt particularly important. Imagine trying to understand what large reptiles might be like but throwing out dinosaur studies because the data is thousands of years old.