How do we have the equipment to picture and see cosmos and stars millions of light years away, but can’t just zoom-in to examine and view the surfaces of our interplanetary planets in the solar system?
In: Physics
The bottom line is that luminosity is tricky. A star 10,000 light years away may be far brighter than our sun, but the sun obviously appears brighter because it’s so close. We can see distant objects primarily because they are ridiculously bright and sending us their light from across the universe.
The next thing to consider, planets don’t emit their own light, they are reflecting the light from the sun. So while they are rather dim objects, they are close to us so they appear brighter than most stars in the night sky. And while we can actually see some pretty amazing detail of these planets with a telescope on the Earth, there’s still a lot we can’t see because it’s just too far away, but “zooming in” as it were, has its limits in the detail we can see.
Finally, stars from distant solar systems mostly just look like bright blobs, so while they are astoundingly bright, we don’t end up seeing much in the way of detail. Looking at distant galaxies are pretty cool too, but the detail we’re seeing in them is still limited because of distance. In an individual galaxy you can’t even really tell a single star, it’s just a swirly pattern, but the whole thing is made up of a billion billion stars so it’s altogether even brighter than the stars closer to us. The “detail” we supposedly see in distant galaxies is actually billions of stars making up this thing, this pattern.
So we actually can see better detail in the planets in our solar system, it just appears that we’re getting less detail compared to distant galaxies, but yeah, those things are huge, absolutely ginormous, so there appears to be greater detail, but it’s actually all more fuzzy, with individual stars not even discernable other than we know they are there.
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