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I worked at NASA - here's the shocking truth about some of most iconic photos from space (they're NOT real!)
Search the internet for an image of the Milky Way and you'll find dozens of pictures showcasing our home galaxy in its full spiraling glory.
But a former NASA space analyst has shared the 'truth' about the photographs, revealing they're not real.
Alexandra Doten explained that humans have only seen illustrations of what scientists believe the Milky Way looks like.
That's because snapping a photo of our galaxy in its entirety would mean sending a spacecraft beyond its edge - which might never even be possible, Doten said.
This image of the Milky Way may look like a real photo, but it's actually just an illustration. It's impossible to photograph our home galaxy in its entirety with current technology.
'There isn't a single full photo of the Milky Way, which is the galaxy we live in,' former NASA space analyst and science content creator Alexandra Doten revealed in a recent TikTok.
'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,' Doten said.
Doten is a science content creator and former NASA space analyst, whose job involved providing technical and policy support to the Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) branch at NASA Headquarters.
This year, she made Forbes' 30 Under 30 list of social media influencers for her educational astronomy TikToks.
The Milky Way is a disk-shaped spiral galaxy that's a whopping 100,000 light-years wide - the equivalent of 600,000 trillion miles - and 1,000 light years thick.
Our planet sits in a solar system roughly halfway between the galaxy's center and its outer rim.
To photograph our home galaxy in its entirety, 'a spacecraft would have to travel either up or down from the disk of the Milky way - and travel so incredibly far,' Doten said.
That spacecraft would have to make it far beyond our galaxy's edge. That's distance of at least 500 light-years.
'But the farthest a spacecraft has ever traveled isn't even to the next closest star, Doten said.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft currently holds the record for the farthest distance ever traveled by a spacecraft. But that distance is only 0.002 light-years away from Earth.
So it's highly unlikely that a spacecraft will be able to travel outside of our galaxy within your lifetime.
But astronomers can still create accurate illustrations of what the Milky Way galaxy should look like based on things we can see from Earth, Doten explained.
The first clue that our galaxy was shaped like a spiral disk came from simply looking up.
The concentrated band of stars that stretches across the sky was one of the first clues that we live in a disk-shaped spiral galaxy.
Astronomers surmised that the Milky Way is shaped like a flat disk from the bright band of stars that stretches across the sky - which is also where our galaxy gets its name.
You've probably seen it if you've ever looked up at the sky on a very dark, clear night.
The fact that we can see this band from inside the Milky Way tells us that our galaxy is basically flat. It's also strong evidence that we live in a spiral galaxy.
If we lived in an elliptical galaxy - which is shaped like an oval - we would see stars spread out all over the sky - not concentrated in a single band.
The shape of the Milky Way has also been confirmed through 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, and have allowed astronomers to peer into the very 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 in the middle - Sagittarius A.
Astronomers can also track the motions of stars as they orbit this center and use our understanding of gravity to model what the core must look like.
This technique also revealed that we live in a 'barred' spiral galaxy, which means that it has a central bar of stars, gas and dust that connects the spiral arms to the nucleus - or centerpoint.
And we've learned a lot from imaging other galaxies too.
Telescope images of spiral galaxies like Andromeda, our nearest spiral neighbor, help illustrators approximate what the Milky Way probably looks like.
For example, these photos tell us that most disk galaxies host spiral arms and a dense central bulge, so it's safe to assume that ours probably does too.
Putting all these observations together is what allows us to create highly accurate depictions of our galaxy - even though humans have never seen it in its entirety.
'It's basically like sitting in a seat of a Ferris wheel and looking in and trying to draw the rest of the Ferris wheel,' Doten said.
'In general, you're gonna get it pretty right.'