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
With stars, often no matter how much you zoom in they actually don’t get bigger in the image. It’s just a dot of light.
A lot of images of nebula are actually not that small in the sky but instead very dim. We open the telescope for minutes to hours to even days to collect enough light to see these images.
So how do we even find these exoplanets? Well we stare at a star and watch its light, and when the light dims consistent to a planet passing in front of it in orbit, we’ve found a planet. We can then study the light and actually even tell what it’s made up of by how it absorbs light.
It’s wild.
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