Featured Image Credit: Shawn PNW/500px / NurPhoto/Contributor / Getty
NASA has taken some incredible photos over its history, from pictures of planets, space missions and much more.
But one thing they’ve never managed to photograph is the Milky Way.
Former NASA analyst and science communicator Alexandra Doten took to TikTok to explain why the photographs we have of the large spiral galaxy aren't real.
Responding to the question "How do we take pictures of the Milky Way if we are in it?" Doten explained that we simply can't.
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"Every full image you see of the Milky Way is an illustration," she said in the video.
"We cannot see the Milky Way like this, and I don't think humans ever will."
The reason is basically because we live inside the Milky Way, on the edge of one of its spiral arms.
To get an actual photo of the whole galaxy, we’d have to leave it entirely and we’re nowhere close to being able to do that.
According to NASA: "It takes 250 million years for our Sun and the solar system to go all the way around the center of the Milky Way.
"We can only take pictures of the Milky Way from inside the galaxy, which means we don't have an image of the Milky Way as a whole".
For a long time, we knew the shape of the Earth by mapping the surface and measuring the Earth's gravity at different points.
NASA scientists were able to determine the shape of our planet and prove that it was spherical.
Then in 1972, the first image of Earth was captured when astronauts travelled far enough out into space to achieve such a view.
Astronaut Ron Evans or Harrison Schmitt took the famous 'Blue Marble' image while onboard Apollo 17, heading to the Moon.
"To get [images of the Milky Way] a spacecraft would have to travel either up or down from the disk of the Milky Way, and travel so incredibly far," Doten explained.
But that doesn’t mean we’re totally in the dark about what the Milky Way looks like. When you look up at the night sky, most of the stars you see are part of our galaxy.
Scientists have been able to map these stars and piece together an idea of what the Milky Way looks like.
The TikToker compares it to creating an image of a Ferris wheel whilst you're riding on it.
You can’t see the whole thing at once, but with enough observations and mapping, you can figure out what it looks like.
