(Redirected from Milky way)
The Milky Way as it appears in the night sky from a dark location.
The 'Milky Way', when observed from
Earth's surface, is the hazy band of
white light that is seen in the
night sky, arching across the entire
celestial sphere. It is composed of
stars and other material lying within the
galactic plane of our galaxy, 'The Milky Way Galaxy'. The word galaxy (from the Ancient Greek γαλαξίας) means "milky".
The Milky Way
The Milky Way as seen in a very wide angle image showing the whole horizon taken from a very
dark sky location (
Death Valley).
The Milky Way appears brightest in the direction of the
constellation of
Sagittarius, towards the
galactic center. Relative to the
celestial equator, the Milky Way passes as far north as the constellation of
Cassiopeia and as far south as the constellation of
Crux, indicating the high inclination of Earth's
equatorial plane and the plane of the
ecliptic relative to the galactic plane. The fact that the Milky Way divides the night sky into two roughly equal
hemispheres indicates that the Solar System lies close to the galactic plane. Although the Milky Way has an
absolute magnitude of −20.9,
it has a relatively low
apparent magnitude,which makes it difficult to see from any urban or suburban location suffering from
light pollution.
Name and myths
Main articles: List of names for the Milky Way,
Milky Way (mythology)
There are many
creation myths around the world which explain the origin of the Milky Way and give it its name. The English phrase is a translation from Greek Γαλαξίας ''Galaxias'' which is derived from the word for milk (γάλα, ''gala''). This is also the origin of the word
galaxy. In Greek myth the Milky Way was caused by milk spilt by
Hera when suckled by
Heracles.
The term ''Milky Way'' first appeared in the English literature in a poem by
Chaucer.
In a large area from
Central Asia to
Africa, the name for the Milky Way is related to the word for straw. It has been claimed that this was spread by
Arabs who in turned borrowed the word from Armenian.
[1] In several
Uralic and
Turkic languages and in the
Baltic languages the Milky Way is called the "Birds' Path". The Chinese name "Silver River" (銀河) is used throughout
East Asia, including Korea. In Japan, "Silver River" (銀河) means galaxies in general and the Milky Way is called the "River of Heaven" (天の川).
Discovery of "our Galaxy"
:''See also:
Galaxy-Observation history''
The
Greek philosopher Democritus (450 BC–370 BC) was the first known person to propose that the Milky Way might consist of distant stars. Actual proof of this came in 1610 when
Galileo Galilei used a
telescope to study the Milky Way and discovered that it was composed of a huge number of faint stars.
[2] In a treatise in 1755,
Immanuel Kant, drawing on earlier work by
Thomas Wright, speculated (correctly) that the Milky Way might be a rotating body of a huge number of stars, held together by
gravitational forces akin to the solar system but on much larger scales. The resulting disk of stars would be seen as a band on the sky from our perspective inside the disk. Kant also conjectured that some of the
nebulae visible in the night sky might be separate "galaxies" themselves, similar to the Milky Way.
[3]
The shape of the Milky Way Galaxy as deduced from star counts by William Herschel in 1785; the solar system was assumed near center.
The first attempt to describe the shape of the Milky Way and the position of the
Sun within it was carried out by
William Herschel in 1785 by carefully counting the number of stars in different regions of the sky. He produced a diagram of the shape of the galaxy with the solar system close to the center.
In 1845,
Lord Rosse constructed a new telescope and was able to distinguish between elliptical and spiral-shaped nebulae. He also managed to make out individual point sources in some of these nebulae, lending credence to Kant's earlier conjecture.
[4]
In 1917,
Heber Curtis had observed the nova
S Andromedae within the "Great
Andromeda Nebula" (
Messier object M31}. Searching the photographic record, he found 11 more
novae. Curtis noticed that these novae were, on average, 10
magnitudes fainter than those that occurred within our galaxy. As a result he was able to come up with a distance estimate of 150,000 parsecs. He became a proponent of the so-called "island universes" hypothesis, which held that the spiral nebulae were actually independent galaxies.
[5]
Photograph of the "Great Andromeda Nebula" from 1899, later identified as the
Andromeda Galaxy
In 1920 the so-called
Great Debate took place between
Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, concerning the nature of the Milky Way, spiral nebulae, and the dimensions of the universe. To support his claim that the Great Andromeda Nebula was an external galaxy, Curtis noted the appearance of dark lanes resembling the dust clouds in the Milky Way, as well as the significant
Doppler shift.
[6]
The matter was conclusively settled by
Edwin Hubble in the early 1920s using a new telescope. He was able to resolve the outer parts of some spiral nebulae as collections of individual stars and identified some
Cepheid variables, thus allowing him to estimate the distance to the nebulae: they were far too distant to be part of the Milky Way.
[7] In 1936 Hubble produced a classification system for galaxies that is used to this day, the
Hubble sequence.
[8]
The Milky Way Galaxy
The 'Milky Way' is the
galaxy where the
Solar System (and
Earth) is located. It is a
barred spiral[9] galaxy of a
Local Group of galaxies within the
Virgo Supercluster. The main disk of the galaxy is about 80,000 to 100,000
light-years in
diameter, about 250,000 to 300,000 light-years in
circumference, and outside the
Galactic core, about 2,300–2,600 light-years in thickness.
[10]
The galaxy is estimated to contain 200
[11]
billion stars but this number may be as high as 400 billion
[12]
if small-mass stars predominate. As a guide to the relative physical
scale of the Milky Way, if the galaxy were reduced to 130 km (80 mi) in diameter, the
solar system would be a mere 2 mm (0.08 inches) in width. The Galactic Halo extends outward, but is limited in size by the orbits of the two Milky Way satellites, the Large and the Small
Magellanic Clouds, whose
perigalacticon is at ~180,000 light-years.
[13]
New discoveries indicate that the disk extends much farther than previously thought.
The Milky Way is but one of
billions of galaxies in the
observable universe (between 1 and 8).
Evolution of the galaxy
A green and red Perseid meteor is striking the sky just below Milky Way in August, 2007
It is extremely difficult to define the age at which the Milky Way formed, but the age of the oldest stars in the Galaxy is now estimated to be about 13.6
billion years, nearly as
old as the Universe itself.
[14]
This estimate is based on research done in
2004 by astronomers Luca Pasquini, Piercarlo Bonifacio,
Sofia Randich, Daniele Galli, and Raffaele G. Gratton. The team used the UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the
Very Large Telescope to
measure, for the first time, the
beryllium content of two
stars in
globular cluster NGC 6397. This allowed them to deduce the elapsed time between the rise of the first generation of stars in the entire Galaxy and the first generation of stars in the cluster, at 200 million to 300 million
years. By including the estimated age of the stars in the globular cluster (13.4 ± 0.8 billion years), they estimated the age of the oldest Milky Way stars at 13.6 ± 0.8 billion years. (See also
nucleocosmochronology.)
Composition and structure
NGC 7331 is often referred to as "the Milky Way's twin." This is what an observer from another galaxy might see when looking at the Milky Way.
The overall shape of the Milky Way is believed to be a barred spiral galaxy. It consists of a bar-shaped core region surrounded by a disk of gas, dust and stars. Within the disk region are several arm structures that spiral outward in a
logarithmic spiral shape. The mass distribution within the Milky Way closely resembles the Sbc
Hubble classification, which is a spiral-galaxy with relatively loosely-wound arms.
[15] It was only in the
1980s that astronomers began to suspect that the Milky Way is a barred spiral
[16] rather than an ordinary
spiral, which observations in
2005 with the
Spitzer Space Telescope have since confirmed, showing that the galaxy's central bar is larger than previously suspected.
[17] This argues for a classification of type SBbc (loosely wound barred spiral). In 1970
Gérard de Vaucouleurs predicted that the Milky Way was of type SAB(rs)bc, where the "rs" indicates a broken ring structure around the core region.
[18]
As of
2006, the Milky Way's
mass is thought to be about 5.8
M☉[19][20][21] comprising 200 to 400 billion stars. Its integrated absolute visual magnitude has been estimated to be −20.9. Most of the mass of the Milky Way is thought to be
dark matter, forming a
dark matter halo of an estimated 600–3000 billion
solar masses (M
☉) which is spread out relatively evenly.
[22]
Galactic center
Main articles: Galactic Center
The galactic center in the direction of
Sagittarius. The primary stars of Sagittarius are indicated in red.
The galactic disk, which bulges outward at the galactic center, has a diameter of between 70,000 and 100,000
light-years.
[23] The distance from the
Sun to the galactic center is now estimated at 26,000 ± 1400 light-years while older estimates could put the Sun as far as 35,000 light-years from the central bulge.
The galactic center harbors a compact object of very large mass (named
Sagittarius A
★ ), strongly suspected to be a
supermassive black hole. Most galaxies are believed to have a supermassive black hole at their center.
[24]
The galaxy's bar is thought to be about 27,000 light-years long, running through the center of the galaxy at a 44 ± 10 degree angle to the line between the Sun and the center of the galaxy. It is composed primarily of red stars, believed to be ancient.
The bar is surrounded by a ring called the "5-
kpc ring" that contains a large fraction of the molecular hydrogen present in the galaxy and most of the Milky Way's star formation activity. Viewed from the
Andromeda Galaxy, it would be the brightest feature of the Milky Way.
[25]
Spiral arms
Each spiral arm describes a
logarithmic spiral (as do the arms of all spiral galaxies) with a pitch of approximately 12 degrees. There are believed to be four major spiral arms which all start at the Galaxy's center. These are named as follows, according to the image at left:
Observed and extrapolated structure of the spiral arms
Outside of the major spiral arms is the
Outer Ring or
Monoceros Ring, a ring of stars around the Milky Way proposed by astronomers
Brian Yanny and
Heidi Jo Newberg, which consists of gas and stars torn from other galaxies billions of years ago.
As is typical for many galaxies, the distribution of mass in the Milky Way is such that the orbital speed of most stars in the galaxy does not depend strongly on its distance from the center. Away from the central bulge or outer rim, the typical stellar velocity is between 210 and 240 km/s.
[26] Hence the orbital period of the typical star is directly proportional only to the length of the path traveled. This is unlike in the
solar system where different orbits are also expected to have significantly different velocities associated with them, and is one of the major pieces of evidence for the existence of
dark matter. Another interesting aspect is the so-called "wind-up problem" of the spiral arms. If one believes that the inner parts of the arms rotate faster than the outer part, then the galaxy will wind up so much that the spiral structure will be thinned out. But this is not what is observed in spiral galaxies. Instead astronomers propose that the spiral arms form as a result of a matter-density wave emanating from the galactic center. This can be likened to a moving traffic jam on a highway—the cars are all moving but there is always a region of slow-moving cars. Thus this results in several spiral arms where there are a lot of stars and gas. This model also agrees with enhanced star formation in or near spiral arms; the compressional waves increase the density of molecular Hydrogen and protostars form as a result.
Halo
The galactic disk is surrounded by a
spheroid halo of old stars and
globular clusters, whose 90% lie within 100,000 light-years,
[27] suggesting a stellar halo diameter of 200,000 light-years. However, a few globular clusters have been found farther, such as PAL 4 and AM1 at more than 200,000 light-years away from the galactic center. While the disk contains gas and dust obscuring the view in some wavelengths, the spheroid component does not. Active
star formation takes place in the disk (especially in the spiral arms, which represent areas of high density), but not in the halo.
Open clusters also occur primarily in the disk.
Recent discoveries have added dimension to the knowledge of the Milky Way's structure. With the discovery that the disc of the
Andromeda Galaxy (M31) extends much further than previously thought,
[28] the possibility of the disk of the Milky Way extending further is apparent, and this is supported by evidence of the newly discovered
Outer Arm extension of the
Cygnus Arm.
[29] With the discovery of the
Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy came the discovery of a ribbon of galactic debris as the polar orbit of
Sagittarius and its interaction with the Milky Way tears it apart. Similarly, with the discovery of the
Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, a ring of galactic debris from its interaction with the Milky Way encircles the galactic disk.
On
January 9 2006,
Mario Juric and others of
Princeton University announced that the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey of the northern sky found a huge and diffuse structure (spread out across an area around 5,000 times the size of a full moon) within the Milky Way that does not seem to fit within current models. The collection of stars rises close to perpendicular to the plane of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. The proposed likely interpretation is that a
dwarf galaxy is merging with the Milky Way. This galaxy is tentatively named the
Virgo Stellar Stream and is found in the direction of
Virgo about 30,000 light-years away.
Sun's location
360-degree photographic panorama of the entire galaxy, from the viewpoint of the solar system.
The
Sun (and therefore the
Earth and
Solar System) may be found close to the inner rim of the
Orion Arm, in the
Local Fluff, at a hypothesized distance of 7.62±0.32
kpc from the
Galactic Center.
[30][31][32] The distance between the local arm and the next arm out, the
Perseus Arm, is about
6,500 light-years.
[33] The Sun, and thus the solar system, is found in what scientists call the
galactic habitable zone.
The Apex of the Sun's Way, or the
solar apex, is the direction that the Sun travels through space in the Milky Way. The general direction of the sun's galactic motion is towards the star
Vega near the constellation of
Hercules, at an angle of roughly 60 sky degrees to the direction of the
Galactic Center. The sun's orbit around the galaxy is expected to be roughly elliptical with the addition of perturbations due to the galactic spiral arms and non-uniform mass distributions. In addition the Sun oscillates up and down relative to the galactic plane approximately 2.7 times per orbit. This is very similar to how a
simple harmonic oscillator works with no drag force (dampening) term.
It takes the
solar system about 225–250 million years to complete one orbit (a ''
galactic year''),
[34]
and so is thought to have completed about 20–25 orbits during its lifetime or 0.0008 orbit since the origin of humans. The
orbital speed of the solar system is 217 km/s, i.e., 1 light-year in ca. 1400 years, and 1
AU in 8 days.
Environment
Main articles: Local group,
Andromeda-Milky Way collision
The Milky Way and the
Andromeda Galaxy are a binary system of giant spiral galaxies. Together with their companion galaxies they form the
Local Group, a group of some 50 closely bound galaxies. The Local Group is part of the
Virgo Supercluster.
The Milky Way is orbited by two smaller galaxies and a number of
dwarf galaxies in the Local Group. The largest of these is the
Large Magellanic Cloud with a diameter of 20,000 light-years. It has a close companion, the
Small Magellanic Cloud. The
Magellanic Stream is a peculiar streamer of neutral hydrogen gas connecting these two small galaxies. The stream is thought to have been dragged from the Magellanic Clouds in tidal interactions with the Milky Way. Some of the dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way are
Canis Major Dwarf (the closest),
Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy,
Ursa Minor Dwarf,
Sculptor Dwarf,
Sextans Dwarf,
Fornax Dwarf, and
Leo I Dwarf. The smallest Milky Way dwarf galaxies are only 500 light-years in diameter. These include
Carina Dwarf,
Draco Dwarf, and
Leo II Dwarf. There may still be undetected dwarf galaxies, which are dynamically bound to the Milky Way. Observations through the
zone of avoidance are frequently detecting new distant and nearby galaxies. Some galaxies consisting mostly of gas and dust may also have evaded detection so far.
In January 2005, researchers reported that the heretofore unexplained warp in the disk of the Milky Way has now been mapped and found to be a ripple or vibration set up by the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds as they circle the Milky Way, causing vibrations at certain frequencies when they pass through the edges of the Galaxy. Previously, these two galaxies, at around 2% of the mass of the Milky Way, were considered too small to influence the Milky Way. However, by taking into account
dark matter, the movement of these two galaxies creates a wake that influences the larger Milky Way. Taking dark matter into account results in an approximately twentyfold increase in mass for the Milky Way. This calculation is according to a computer model made by
Martin Weinberg of the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In this model, the dark matter is spreading out from the Milky Way disk with the known gas layer. As a result, the model predicts that the gravitational impact of the Magellanic Clouds is amplified as they pass through the Milky Way.
Current measurements suggest the
Andromeda Galaxy is approaching us at 100 to 140 kilometers per second (62 to 87 miles per second). The Milky Way may collide with it in 3 to 4 billion years, depending on the importance of unknown lateral components to the galaxies' relative motion. If they collide, it is thought that the Sun and the other stars in the Milky Way will probably not collide with the stars of Andromeda, but that the two galaxies will merge to form a single
elliptical galaxy over the course of about a billion years.
[35]
Velocity
In the general sense, the absolute velocity of any object through space is not a meaningful question according to
Einstein's
Special Theory of Relativity, which declares that there is no "preferred"
inertial frame of reference in space with which to compare the galaxy's motion. (Motion must always be specified with respect to another object.)
Many astronomers believe the galaxy is moving at approximately 600 km per second relative to the observed locations of other nearby galaxies. Most recent estimates range from 130 km/s to 1,000 km/s. If the Milky Way is moving at 600 km/s, Earth travels 51.84 million km per day, or more than 18.9 billion km per year, about 4.5 times its closest distance from
Pluto. The Milky Way is thought to be moving towards the constellation
Hydra, and may someday become a close-knit member of the
Virgo cluster of galaxies.
Another reference frame is provided by the
Cosmic microwave background (CMB). The Milky Way is moving at around 552 km/s
[36]
with respect to this frame. This can be observed by satellites such as
COBE and
WMAP as a dipole contribution to the CMB, as photons in equilibrium at the CMB frame get
blue-shifted in the direction of the motion and
red-shifted in the opposite direction.
References
1. The Armenian name of the Milky Way, , Hayk, Harutyunyan, ArAS News,
2. Galileo Galilei J. J. O'Connor, E. F. Robertson
3. Our Galaxy
4. The Earl of Rosse and the Leviathan of Parsontown
5. Novae in Spiral Nebulae and the Island Universe Theory, Heber D. Curtis, , , Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 1988
6. Robert Julius Trumpler
7. A spiral nebula as a stellar system, Messier 31, E. P. Hubble, , , Astrophysical JournalEngl, 1929
8. Edwin Hubble, 1889–1953, , Allan, Sandage, The Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, 1989
9. Another bar in the Bulge, C. Alard, , , Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2001
10. Galaxy, The
11. Milky Way galaxy is warped and vibrating like a drum Robert Sanders
12. The Milky Way Galaxy Frommert, H.; Kronberg, C.
13. N-body simulations of the Magellanic stream et al. Connors
14. How Old is the Milky Way?
15. Mass distribution in our Galaxy, , Gerhard, Ortwin, Space Science Reviews, 2002
16. On the spiral arm interpretation of COMPTEL ^26^Al map features, Chen, W.; Gehrels, N.; Diehl, R.; Hartmann, D., , , Space Science Reviews, 1996
17. Bar at Milky Way's heart revealed Maggie McKee
18. The Long Bar in the Milky Way: Corroboration of an Old Hypothesis, López-Corredoira, M.; Cabrera-Lavers, A.; Mahoney, T. J.; Hammersley, P. L.; Garzón, F.; González-Fernández, C., , , The Astronomical Journal, 2007
19. Masses of the local group and of the M81 group estimated from distortions in the local velocity field, Karachentsev, I. D.; Kashibadze, O. G., , , Astrophysics, 2006
20. Mass of the Milky Way
21. The radial velocity dispersion profile of the Galactic halo: Constraining the density profile of the dark halo of the Milky Way, Battaglia, G.; Helmi, A.; Morrison, H.; Harding, P.; Olszewski, E. W.; Mateo, M.; Freeman, K. C.; Norris, J.; Shectman, S. A., , , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2005
22. filler
23. The Stars of the Milky Way
24.
25. Introduction: Galactic Ring Survey Staff
26. Mass of the Milky Way Galaxy
27. Catalog of Parameters for Milky Way Globular Clusters: The Database
28. On the accretion origin of a vast extended stellar disk around the Andromeda galaxy, Ibata, R.; Chapman, S.; Ferguson, A. M. N.; Lewis, G.; Irwin, M.; Tanvir, N., , , Astrophysical Journal, 2005
29. Outer Disk Ring?
30. The distance to the center of the Galaxy, , Mark J., Reid, Annual review of astronomy and astrophysics, 1993
31. A Geometric Determination of the Distance to the Galactic Center, Eisenhauer, F.; Schödel, R.; Genzel, R.; Ott, T.; Tecza, M.; Abuter, R.; Eckart, A.; Alexander, T., , , The Astrophysical Journal, 2003
32. First results from SPIFFI. I: The Galactic Center, Horrobin, M.; Eisenhauer, F.; Tecza, M.; Thatte, N.; Genzel, R.; Abuter, R.; Iserlohe, C.; Schreiber, J.; Schegerer, A.; Lutz, D.; Ott, T.; Schödel, R., , , Astronomische Nachrichten, 2004
33. Exposing the Stuff Between the Stars Jayanne English
34. Period of the Sun's Orbit around the Galaxy (Cosmic Year)
35. Astrophysicist maps out our own galaxy's end Janet Wong
36. Dipole Anisotropy in the COBE Differential Microwave Radiometers First-Year Sky Maps, Kogut, A.; Lineweaver, C.; Smoot, G. F.; Bennett, C. L.; Banday, A.; Boggess, N. W.; Cheng, E. S.; de Amici, G.; Fixsen, D. J.; Hinshaw, G.; Jackson, P. D.; Janssen, M.; Keegstra, P.; Loewenstein, K.; Lubin, P.; Mather, J. C.; Tenorio, L.; Weiss, R.; Wilkinson, D. T.; Wright, E. L., , , Astrophysical Journal, 1993
External links
★
Running Rings Around the Galaxy Spitzer Space Telescope News
★
The Milky Way Galaxy, SEDS Messier pages
★
MultiWavelength Milky Way, NASA site with images and
VRML models
★
The Milky Way at the Astro-Photography Site Of Mister T. Yoshida.
★
Widefield Image of the Summer Milky Way
★
The Milky Way Galaxy from ''An Atlas of the Universe''
★
Proposed Ring around the Milky Way
★
Milky Way spiral gets an extra arm, New Scientist.com
★
Possible New Milky Way Spiral Arm, Sky and Telescope.com
★
The Milky Way spiral arms and a possible climate connection
★
Galactic center mosaic via sun-orbiting Spitzer infrared telescope
★
Milky Way Plan Views, The University of Calgary Radio Astronomy Laboratory
★
Our Growing, Breathing Galaxy, Scientific American Magazine (January 2004 Issue)
★
Deriving The Shape Of The Galactic Stellar Disc, SkyNightly (March 17, 2006)
★
Digital Sky LLC, Digital Sky's Milky Way Panorama and other images
★
A new view of the Milky Way galaxy obtained by the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE) on NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE).
★
Image of Milky Way galaxy arms, Chandra X-ray Observatory Center
★
The 1920 Shapley - Curtis Debate on the size of the Milky Way
★ Astronomy Picture of the Day:
★
★
Composite image of the Milky Way
★
★
Milky Way Illustrated
★
★
Barred Spiral Milky Way (Illustrated)
★
★
Radioactive Clouds in the Milky Way
★
★
Milky Way Molecule Map
★
★
The Milky Way's Gamma-Ray Halo
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