How don’t we see huge satellite shaped shadows cast on the earth? Wouldn’t satellites be between the sun and the earth meaning that they’d cast a shadow on us?

Question

How don’t we see huge satellite shaped shadows cast on the earth? Wouldn’t satellites be between the sun and the earth meaning that they’d cast a shadow on us?

In: Other

Answer 1

Two things,

– Satellites are very very small compared to celestial objects like the Earth, or even the Moon

– Light has a property called diffraction (made possible because light behaves like a wave). What this means is that light waves tend to bend inwards around the edges of objects

So when satellites come between the Sun and the Earth, their small size and diffraction of light means that their shadow is cast for only a short distance, thus not reaching the Earth’s surface