isnt it true that we've never taken a picture of our galaxy?

Question

arent all the pictures out there drawings and mock-ups? my friend was arguing with me about it, but i mean c'mon. do you know how far we'd have to send out a satellite and would it even work?

thanks for the answers. just to make it clear, i was the one who said we've never gotten a full picture. haha

Answer 1

NO, we have not: Your friend has a very good point.
The space probes that have gone the most distance from the earth are the Voyager series and they haven't even escaped the gravity field of the sun.

We can't take a picture of the outside of the Milky Way Galaxy without sending a spacecraft out there to do it and we are no were near that. We have photographed most of the Milky Way Galaxy, but considering there is a super massive black hole in the center we can't possibly photograph the entire galaxy.

Our sun is in the Orion Arm and near the edge of the Milky Way, but a space probe would have to travel near the speed of light for decades before it would leave the galaxy, and more years after that to be able to fit the entire Milky Way Galaxy inside the picture frame. Then the return signal would take just as long to come back to the Earth. If we used a strong power source like a nuclear power plant then we could create enough radio energy to be received easily, the time is the problem.

Answer 2

This will totally baffle your friend. To get an idea of how big our galaxy, let's talk about light years. A light year is the distance light can travel in one year. 1 light-year is equivalent to about 5.8785 x 10^12 miles (very big). The Milky Way galaxy alone has a diameter of about 100,000 light years! This means that if we were to view a star on the other side of the galaxy, we would be looking at it as it were around 50,000-100,000 years ago! It takes that long for just its light to reach us. If one of our spacecrafts were to ever travel out far enough to take a clear picture of our very own Milky Way, it wouldn't matter to us. The picture alone would take thousands and thousands of years to even get back to Earth.

By the way, the most distant man-made object happens to be Voyager 1. In the year 2020, it should be a little more than 12 billion miles away from the Sun (a minuscule distance compared to the overall size of our galaxy).

As for answering your question, most of the images you see on the internet or in books are computer generated or images taken of galaxies that "appear" like ours.

Answer 3

It's true - we have not been able to take a picture of our galaxy FROM OUTSIDE THE GALAXY. Voyager 1 and 2 (the objects that we've sent furthest away from earth) are deep space probes that finally got past the orbit of Pluto

I suppose you could count pictures taken of the Milky Way. That IS our galaxy, but it's only a part of it. Calling that a picture of our galaxy is like taking a picture of just one step in the stairwell of an office building, and then calling it a picture of the building.

Answer 4

mmm, the exact same question was asked quite some time ago, complete with the reference to a friend arguing...

1) We cannot take a picture of our Galaxy from the outside. Well, not yet...

2) We have taken lots of pictures of it from the inside, and stitched these together to form a complete picture (from the inside) of the portion we can see.

When one takes a picture of a mountain, one often sees only one side of the mountain in the picture. Yet, no one claims that it is "not a picture of the mountain" based on the fact that it does not show all sides of the mountain. It is still a picutre of the mountain.

Therefore, we have taken pictures of our Galaxy. They just don't show the whole thing.

But when we combine all the wavelengths at which we have taken various pictures (dust is more transparent to infrared and to radio), we have caught a lot of it.

Answer 5

We've never taken a picture of our galaxy from the outside. To do that, you have have to travel for a hundred thousand light years or so to get a decent picture.

Of course, we can take a picture from the inside: http://www.richardbell.net/Astrophotos/Images/milkyway.jpg

But pictures like this one are only artists' conceptions: http://www.wwu.edu/depts/skywise/a101/milkyway.jpg

These are based on a reconstruction from observations taken here at Earth. You can see a more schematic view here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Milky_Way_Spiral_Arms.png .

Sometimes, galaxies similar to the Milky Way are used in place of actual pictures of the Milky Way. The most commonly used substitute is the Andromeda Galaxy: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/course/astr534/images/Andromeda.jpg

If you think you've seen a picture of the Milky Way from the outside, you've probably seen a variant of one of these. Your friend might also be confusing the Milky Way Galaxy, a collection of stars that orbit around a common center, with the Solar System, a collection of planets that orbit around the Sun. The Solar System *has* been photographed from the outside, most famously in this image: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery/photogallery-solarsystem.html

Answer 6

No. It's not true.

Here are some pretty ones:

http://www.abmedia.com/astro/articles/nm-trip.html
http://www.astro.lu.se/Resources/Vintergatan/
http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/bmendez/ay10/2002/notes/pics/MultiWavelength_MW.jpg

You can find thousands of images of it or just go outside on a clear dark night and see for yourself.

Of course we can not see our own galaxy from the outside. In order to do that, we would have to travel tens of thousands of light years. But we can reconstruct the 3-d structure from precision measurements:

http://boojum.as.arizona.edu/~jill/NS102_2006/Lectures/MilkyWay/milkyway.html

To me all of these qualify as pictures. Just like an MRI image of my interior organs is good enough for a diagnosis because I really don't care for the doctors to cut me open if it can be done some other way. Same here... if we can get to see the rough shape without having to leave home forever, I take it.

Answer 7

Our galaxy is called the Milky Way. We can see all of it right from where we are.

It would take hundreds of millions of years to get any distance from the galaxy, and then many hundreds of millions of years to get the pictures back.

Answer 8

It is true.
We have not been around long enough to have sent
a probe far enough to get such a picture, or even if such
a thing existed, to get a signal from it at the speed of light.

Answer 9

Certainly we've taken pictures of our galaxy. They just don't look like the pictures we see of galaxies, because there's too much gas and dust in the way. So the pictures of our galaxy don't look like much. They're not very pretty. They're big fuzzy blotches. Astronomers probably find them useful, but nobody else. Any pretty picture of galaxy you see, hopefully will be labeled correctly as a simulation or described as being similar to ours. They'll probably use the M31 in Andromeda for ours..

Answer 10

Well, depends on what you mean.... we've taken tons of pics of it from where we are. It looks like a glowing band of stars.

We've never seen it from *outside*, but we have some pretty good maps using radiotelescopes of it's structure.