I quite frankly understand the concept of light years and how light has to travel before we (humans on earth) can process that image. For example, the sun that we see in the sky is actually the sun 8 minutes prior to when we were viewing it, because it takes 8 minutes for the light of the sun to travel to earth.
With that, how do these mega-telescopes work (Hubble and James Webb)? And does it mean we’ll never be able to see how planets and galaxies look in present time?
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The problem in seeing a galaxy a million of lightyears away is the primary one of brightness, not size. Look at [https://science.nasa.gov/science-red/s3fs-public/styles/image_gallery_scale_960w/public/atoms/m31abtpmoon1024.jpg?itok=Yuu7AXJi](https://science.nasa.gov/science-red/s3fs-public/styles/image_gallery_scale_960w/public/atoms/m31abtpmoon1024.jpg?itok=Yuu7AXJi) that is the moon and the Andromeda galaxy to scale. It is a composite image because the moon is a lot brighter.
The Andromeda galaxy is the second largest object in the sky after our own galactic core. it is 2.5 million lightyears away and larger than our own galaxy. It is quite faint and you can the color as a fuzzy white area with you naked eye. The key to seeing it is to collect a lot of light with a large-diameter telescope and/or record light for a long time.
There is no imaging of planes millions of lightyears away, the farthest away that is directly imaged is 508 lightyears https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets
Even start are not imaged at that distance as more than a single dot the farthest images is 11 740 ly when this list was created https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directly_imaged_exoplanets
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