hi! i was curious how much of astronomy is....theoretical? like not "making stuff up" but making inferrances off of things we can observe? or maybe satellites and photography and measurements have gotten way more percise and theres less "filling in the blanks"? i hope this makes any sense 😅
Certainly there are many things in astronomy that are rooted in well-understood physics. For example (and without going into too much detail), the tools that I use in my research to study star-forming regions come from atomic physics that was "solved" decades ago. Other astronomers who study how fast stars move in galaxies use tools that are rooted in gravitational physics. Across all of astronomy, there is a deep underlying groundwork of well-understood and well-tested physics.
Now, that being said, there is still a lot of inferences being made! We can't simulate a lot of the conditions of outer space here on Earth. If something happens once in the universe (or just a small handful of times), we really only have those examples to go off of and we're left to fill in the blanks. There are a lot of unsolved problems in astronomy and many of which won't have a definitive answer. What can I say? The universe is weird!
Hope I answered your question!
