by Search the Internet for a picture of the Milky Way and you will find dozens of images showing our home galaxy in all its spiraling glory.
But a former NASA space analyst has revealed the “truth” about the photos, revealing that they are not real.
Alexandra Doten explained that so far humanity has only seen images of the Milky Way as scientists imagine it.
Because to take a photo of our entire galaxy, you would have to send a space probe beyond its edges – which might never be possible, Doten said.
This image of the Milky Way may look like a real photograph, but it is actually just an illustration. With current technology, it is impossible to photograph our home galaxy in its entirety.
“There is not a single complete photograph of the Milky Way, the galaxy we live in,” former NASA space analyst and science content writer Alexandra Doten revealed in a recent TikTok.
“Every complete picture of the Milky Way is an illustration. We can’t see the Milky Way that way and I don’t think people ever can,” Doten said.
Doten is a science content writer and former NASA space analyst whose role was to provide technical and policy support to the Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Division at NASA Headquarters.
This year, she made it onto Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list of social media influencers with her educational TikToks on astronomy.
The Milky Way is a disk-shaped spiral galaxy that is an incredible 100,000 light-years wide—or 600,000 trillion miles—and 1,000 light-years thick.
Our planet lies in a solar system approximately halfway between the center and the outer edge of the galaxy.
To photograph our home galaxy in its entirety, “a spacecraft would have to fly either up or down from the disk of the Milky Way – and incredibly long distances,” Doten said.
This spaceship would have to travel far beyond the edge of our galaxy. That is a distance of at least 500 light years.
“But the furthest a spacecraft has ever traveled was not even to the nearest star,” Doten said.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft currently holds the record for the greatest distance ever traveled by a spacecraft. However, this distance from Earth is only 0.002 light years.
Therefore, it is highly unlikely that a spaceship will be able to leave our galaxy in your lifetime.
But astronomers can still create accurate images of what the Milky Way should look like based on things we can see from Earth, Doten explained.
The first indication that our galaxy is shaped like a spiral disk came from a simple look upwards.
The concentrated band of stars stretching across the sky was one of the first indications that we live in a disk-shaped spiral galaxy.
Astronomers suspected that the Milky Way was shaped like a flat disk because of the bright band of stars that stretches across the sky – hence the name of our galaxy.
You’ve probably seen it before if you’ve looked up at the sky on a very dark, clear night.
The fact that we can see this band from the interior of the Milky Way tells us that our galaxy is basically flat. It is also strong evidence that we live in a spiral galaxy.
If we lived in an elliptical galaxy – that is, an oval shape – we would see the stars spread across the sky and not concentrated in a single band.
The shape of the Milky Way has also been confirmed by images taken by powerful telescopes such as Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer and James Webb.
These telescopes capture images of our galaxy in many different wavelengths of light, allowing astronomers to see into the center of the Milky Way.
“We even have a photo of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way,” Doten said.
Powerful telescopes allow astronomers to peer into the center of our galaxy and even capture this image of the supermassive black hole that sits at the center – Sagittarius A.
Astronomers can also track the motions of stars orbiting this center and use their understanding of gravity to create models of what the core must look like.
This technique also revealed that we live in a barred spiral galaxy, meaning it has a central bar of stars, gas and dust that connects the spiral arms to the core – the center.
And we have also learned a lot by imaging other galaxies.
Telescopic images of spiral galaxies like Andromeda, our closest spiral neighbor, help illustrators get an idea of what the Milky Way probably looks like.
For example, these photos tell us that most disk galaxies have spiral arms and a dense central bulge, so it’s safe to assume that our galaxy probably does too.
The combination of all these observations allows us to create extremely accurate images of our galaxy – even though humans have never seen it in its entirety.
“It’s basically like sitting on the seat of a Ferris wheel, looking inside and trying to draw the rest of the Ferris wheel,” Doten said.
“In general, you’ll do pretty well.”
