This is something that has been bothering me for a while as I’m diving through space articles, documentaries etc. All seem to take our observations for granted, which are based on the data of the entire observable universe (light, waves, radiation…) we receive at our, in comparison, tiny speck. How do we know we are interpreting all this correctly with just the research we’ve done in our own solar system and we’re not completely wrong about everything outside of it?
This never seems to be addressed so maybe I’m having a fundamental flaw in my thought process.
Observation is all we have. There’s no indication that anything outside the solar system is different from the things inside of it. Some stars have a light spectrum very similar to our sun, which implies they are stars in similar places in their life. Others have a light spectrum that is very different.
We can use different parallax angles to determine that some stars are much further away than others. Parallax works the same at 10 miles as it does at 10 light years.
Is there some particular observation you don’t understand?