Why is it very difficult for astronomers to find objects like planets and asteroids?

Comedians like to joke that the reason we haven’t been visited by intelligent life from elsewhere in the universe is that aliens have been monitoring earth’s broadcasts of intellectually embarrassing tv programs, like gilligan’s island, fear factor, the jersey shore, and the jerry springer showand so consider us far too primitive to merit a visit. let’s check the assertion that aliens could have been receiving them. tv programs are broadcast at a frequency of about 100mhz with about 100kw of total power in 30frames per second, which emanatesroughly uniformly in all directions. assume that interstellar space transmits these broadcasts without attenuation. no matter how smart they are, aliens would require at least one photon per frame to interpret our signals. findthe number of photons per unit time per unit area reaching a receiver on a possible planet in the nearest star system, which is about 4 light-years away (a light-year is the distance light travels in a year). if aliens aimed a receiver or detector directly at earth, how big (in diameter) would it have to be to receive a photon per frame

Light from the sun reaches the earth in 8.3 minutes. the velocity is 3.00 x 10^8 m/s. how far is earth from the sun? i know how to get to d = (3 x 10^8 m/s)(498 sec). i just don't know how to get from there to the answer being 1.5 x 10^11 m.

Two steel balls, each of mass m, are welded to a light rod of length l and negligible mass and are initially at rest on a smooth horizontal surface. a horizontal force of magnitude f is suddenly applied to the rod as shown. determine (a) the instantaneous acceleration a of the mass center g and (b) the corresponding rate at which the angular velocity of the assembly about g is changing with time.