Lecture19TheMilkyWayGalaxy-WordPress.com.pptVIP

The Milky Way Galaxy Greeks called the hazy band of light around the sky ‘galaxias kuklos’ – milky circle Romans called it ‘via lactia’ – milky road, or milky way But what is it? By the mid-18th century, astronomers new that it was made up of an enormous number of distant stars 1785: William and Caroline Herschel try to map out the distribution of stars: published the ‘Grindstone model’ – the Sun at the center of An irregularly shaped disc of stars The Sun 1922: Jacobus Kapteyn’s model The Sun Harlow Shapley: noticed that although open clusters were randomly scattered about the sky, globular clusters were concentrated in the direction of Sagittarius Therefore center of our system of stars must be somewhere towards Sagittarius Previously, astronomers had thought that galaxy was much smaller and that we were near the center because they did not take into account the dimming of light from stars The Disk: - Contains most stars and dust - Contains most GMCs, so most star formation takes place in disk - Contains all open clusters, a few million to a billion years old - By proportion, the disk is thinner than a pizza crust (not deep dish!) The Halo: - Contains about 200 globular clusters, average age of 11 billion years Spiral Arms: - Long spiral patterns of bright stars, HII regions, star clusters, gas and dust - Sun is located on inner edge of one Galactic year: - The galaxy is rotating: our solar system takes 225 – 250 million years to orbit the galactic center Differences between disk stars and halo stars Astronomers define metals to be any elements that are not H or He Population I stars are metal rich (2 to 3% of their mass is metals) Population II stars are metal poor (0.1% metals) Population I stars are located in the disk, population II stars in the halo Population II stars must be very old – the gas clouds they were formed