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

Well it dosent matter much if an object is 1 cm away or 1000s of lightyears, the main methods of measuring/quantifying it is through light. It is more difficult the farther away you get, and you have to account for a lot of different things, but the ideas of different kinds of spectroscopy and other chararerization techniques are still valid