A content creator has revealed a massive ‘lie’ about the Milky Way that we’ve all likely thought was true our whole lives.
Space is mostly unknown to the human race, despite the huge strides we have made in the past few decades, most recently with discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.
However, there are some misconceptions about the gaping void around our blue planet, that people ought to know.
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TikTok user @astro_alexandra has made a video explaining one of the big falsely believed ‘facts’ about our galaxy in particular.
We always see photos like this of our galaxy and take them as fact. (Getty Stock Image)
Planet Earth is in a solar system, along with the other seven planets (and Pluto too if you want to show it some love), that is bound by the Sun by gravity, however, we are just a part of a wider, more vast galaxy.
You may know this as the Milky Way, which is about 100,000 light-years across and as of September 2023, NASA estimates that there are over 3,200 stars with planets orbiting them in addition to our own Sun.
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Basically, it’s very big.
Alexandra took to social media to explain a misconception about our galaxy to her two-and-a-half million followers and people have been left shocked.
She began the video by saying: “That’s not real,” while pointing at an image of our Milky Way galaxy.
The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across. (Getty Images/Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library)
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Alexandra continued: “There isn’t a single full photo of the Milky Way, which is the galaxy we live in.
“Every full image you see of the Milky Way is an illustration.
“We cannot see the Milky Way like this and I don’t think humans ever will, to get this image, a spacecraft would have to travel either up or down from the disc of the Milky Way, and travel so incredibly far.”
Alexandra revealed that the farthest a spacecraft has travelled isn’t even to our next closest star, but also explained that these illustrations aren’t exactly false either.
“This is what the Milky Way looks like,” Alexandra said.
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“And we know that based on what we can see from Earth, we can see how big it is and where the centre is.”
The social media personality explained that we know that the galaxy is quite flat from looking at the stars, and that it’s a disc shape with different coloured stars.
She went on: “It’s basically like sitting in a seat of a Ferris wheel and trying to draw the rest of the Ferris wheel.
“If you’re sitting over here, you might miss something over here.
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“But in general, you’re gonna get it pretty right. So this is pretty accurate. It’s just not real.”
According to NASA, ‘astronomers measure the amount of dust in the Milky Way and the dominant colours of the light we see, and they match those we find in other typical spiral galaxies’.
And because of this, we’re able to generate an image of the galaxy ‘even though we can’t get outside to see the whole thing’.
Well, my whole life is a lie.
Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/TikTok/astro_alexandra
Topics: Space, Science, TikTok, NASA
