I just had to rerun this post from 2011, an appalling example of what passes for science these days.
See how quickly they slide from a pure product of their imaginations into talking and writing about it as if it were a real thing. It’s like reading a natural history of the jackalope.
“Once upon a time, boys and girls, Pan Prior lived in the forest…”
You could be embarrassed for these people, if they didn’t cost so much.
P.S.–Absolutely no relation to Maddy Prior.
Indeed, a lot of science is speculative at best. Ever wonder where they get this distant views of the Milky Way? These HAVE to be drawings, because we’ve never sent anything much beyond the boundaries of the Solar System, not to mention the boundaries of the galaxy. Many “space pictures” are drawings or computer enhanced images, which are drawings a computer makes based upon data points from a much blurrier, indistinct image from a telescope or radio telescope. The fact is, real space images are not so pretty to look at, but since they’ve given themselves license to “enhance” these images, there is a lot of imagination at play. This is much like computer models which can be easily manipulated towards desired results.
Holy moley! Those fantastic pictures from the Hubbell Telescope–they’ve been, shall we say, enhanced? Say it ain’t so, Joe! *sigh* I guess plain old nature just isn’t good enough for science anymore.
I’m not sure about the Hubble images. The Hubble is in a class by itself as an optical telescope. I sure hope that the Deep Field, Deep,Field South and Ultra Deep Field are not enhanced.
In general, however, most detailed images of deep Space are radio-telescope derived and from what I’ve seen, the raw images are pretty blurry. They may be able to learn a lot from these images, especially by tracking movement, which tells volumes, but the detailed pictures you see of galaxies, especially the Milky Way, are probably filled with conjecture. It is impossible to take a picture from outside the Milky Way, when you are inside the Milky Way.
Here’s an example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ssc2005-19a.jpg
What’s the big swirly thing in the middle of the picture?
If anybody says that’s our own Milky Way galaxy seen from the outside, ten thousand light-years away, I’m pickin’ up my ball and goin’ home.