Milky Way Galaxy
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AccessScience from McGraw-Hill Education Page 1 of 9 www.accessscience.com Milky Way Galaxy Contributed by: Leo Blitz Publication year: 2014 The large disk-shaped aggregation of stars, gas, and dust in which the solar system is located. The term Milky Way is used to refer to the diffuse band of light visible in the night sky emanating from the Milky Way Galaxy. Although the two terms are frequently used interchangeably, Milky Way Galaxy, or simply the Galaxy, refers to the physical object rather than its appearance in the night sky, while Milky Way is used to refer to either. Appearance The Milky Way is visible in the night sky to the unaided eye as a broad diffuse band of light stretching from horizon to horizon when viewed from locations away from bright city lights ( Fig. 1 ). Nearly all of the visible light is due to individual stars, which in many directions are too numerous to be resolved without a telescope. The patchy appearance of the Milky Way is due to collections of microscopic dust particles which block the light of more distant stars. All of the stars seen by the unaided eye are part of the Milky Way Galaxy and lie relatively close to the Sun. The overall appearance is due to the Sun’s location near the midplane of the galactic disk; the diffuse band of light is seen toward directions close to the midplane where there are many more stars along the line of sight than in directions away from the plane. Structure and contents 11 The Milky Way Galaxy contains about 2 × 10, solar masses of visible matter. Roughly 96% is in the form of stars, and about 4% is in the form of interstellar gas. The gas both inside the stars and in the interstellar medium is primarily hydrogen (roughly 87–90% by number of atoms) and helium (about 10%) with a small admixture of all of the heavier atoms (0–3% depending on the location within the Galaxy). The mass of dust is about 1% of the interstellar gas mass and is an insignificant fraction of the total mass of the Galaxy. Its presence, however, limits the view from the Earth in the plane of the Galaxy to a small fraction of the Galaxy’s diameter in most directions. See also: INTERSTELLAR MATTER . The Milky Way Galaxy contains four major structural subdivisions: the nucleus, bulge, disk, and halo. The Sun is located in the disk about halfway between the center and the indistinct outer edge of the disk of stars. The currently accepted value of the distance of the Sun from the galactic center is 8.5 kiloparsecs, although some 5 measurements suggest that the distance may be as small as 7 kpc. (A parsec is equal to 2.06 × 10, times the average distance between the Sun and the Earth, and is approximately equal to the average distance between stars in the solar neighborhood; it is also equal to 3.26 light-years.) Figure 2 is an infrared image of the Milky Way AccessScience from McGraw-Hill Education Page 2 of 9 www.accessscience.com WIDTH:EFig. 1 Panoramic photograph of the entire Milky Way. The dark patches are nearby clouds containing interstellar dust that block out the background starlight. The photograph conveys the overall impression of the flattened distribution of stars that make up the disk. The direction of the galactic center is in the center but it is hidden by foregr ound dust. The galactic bulge can be seen as the thickening of the disk in the center. ( European Southern Obser vator y ) WIDTH:CFig. 2 Infrared image of the Milky Way as seen from the location of the Sun, made from the 2MASS infrared sky survey. The image shows both the bulge and the disk of the Milky Way. Absorption by dust is minimized in the infrared, which accounts for the difference between this image and Fig. 1. However, the dust remains visible as the dark band across the disk and other dark patches. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are visible in the lower right. The faint vertical wisp coming down from the left part of the bulge is the Sagittarius Dwarf. ( 2MASS ) made from the Sun’s position in the disk, showing the bulge and disk of the Galaxy. The infrared image minimizes the obscuring effect of dust. Figure 3 shows a spiral galaxy that is structurally similar to the Milky Way, giving an approximate idea of how the Milky Way would appear if viewed obliquely. See also: INFRARED ASTRONOMY ; PARSEC . Nucleus. The nucleus of the Milky Way is a region within a few tens of parsecs of the geometric center and is totally obscured at visible wavelengths. The nucleus is the source of very energetic activity detected by means of radio waves and infrared radiation. At the galactic center, there is a very dense cluster of hot stars observed by means of its infrared radiation. In 1997, astronomers confirmed the existence of a black hole with a mass of about 2.5 million times the mass of the AccessScience from McGraw-Hill Education Page 3 of 9 www.accessscience.com WIDTH:DFig. 3 NGC 4603, a galaxy with a gross morphology similar to the Milky Way, seen obliquely. The spiral arms and the bulge are visible in the center. The bulge appears to be elongated because the galaxy also contains a bar, an extended feature containing primarily old stars that rotate collectively about the center as if they were a solid body. ( NASA ) ∗ Sun at the position of an unresolved source of radio emission known as Sgr A, in the middle of the central star cluster. The black hole appears to be the dynamical center of the Milky Way, and evidence for its existence appears to be unequivocal. Many spiral galaxies show evidence of black holes at their centers. At a distance of ∗ about 1.5 pc from Sgr A, is a ring of gas consisting primarily of molecular hydrogen that surrounds the central star cluster. Within this ring is a three-armed “minispiral” of ionized gas that appears to be falling into the central cluster and possibly onto the black hole ( Fig. 4 ). Molecular hydrogen gas, which is characterized by low temperatures and relatively high densities, is found in great profusion in the inner few hundred parsecs of the Milky Way. Great arcs of gas resulting from the interaction of cosmic rays and magnetic fields have been mapped in the central tens of parsecs of the Milky Way, attesting to the energetic activity taking place there. See also: BLACK HOLE ; COSMIC RAYS ; RADIO ASTRONOMY . Bulge. The bulge is a spheroidal distribution of stars centered on the nucleus which extends to a distance of about 3 kpc from the center. It contains a relatively old population of stars, very nearly as old as the Milky Way itself. The bulge can be seen by the unaided eye as a thickening of the diffuse band of light that constitutes the Milky Way in the direction of the galactic center, toward the constellation Sagittarius. There is little gas and dust throughout most of the volume of the bulge. Direct imaging with infrared satellites has demonstrated that the bulge is actually an elongated barlike structure with a length about two to three times its width. The Milky Way is thus classified as a barred spiral galaxy, a classification that includes about half of all disk-shaped galaxies. See also: STELLAR POPULATION . AccessScience from McGraw-Hill Education Page 4 of 9 www.accessscience.com WIDTH:CFig. 4 Radio image of the ionized gas within about 1.5 parsecs of the center of the Galaxy. The image, made with the Very Large Array (VLA), shows what appears to be a three-armed spiral of gas. Other observations indicate that this gas may be falling into the central star cluster (not seen in this image). The position of Sgr A* is indicated by the elongated bright dot seen above the horizontal bar of emission. The dot is thought to be radio emission from hot gas falling into the black hole. ( NRAO, courtesy of N. Killeen and K.-Y. Lo ) Disk. The disk is a thin distribution of stars and gas orbiting the nucleus of the Galaxy. The disk of stars begins near the end of the bar and can be identified to about 16 kpc from the center of the Galaxy; the disk of gas can be identified to about twice this distance, about 35 kpc from the center. The thicknesses of the disks are characterized by a scale height: the distance from the midplane at which the density of gas and stars falls by a factor of e (2.718. ). In the solar vicinity, the scale height is different for each of the components of the disk, varying from about 75 pc for the molecular gas to about 350 pc for the lowest-mass stars. The faint, low-mass stars make up most of the mass of the disk. There is also a thick disk of stars and gas with a scale height of about 1.5 kpc for the stars and about 1 kpc for the atomic gas. The origin of these thick disks is not known. The thin disk of stars contains most of the mass and has a thickness relative to its diameter similar to that of a commercial compact disk. At this scale, the bulge would have the size of a sausage about 2.5 cm (1 in.) in length superimposed on the nucleus. The star and gas disks are both warped; the gas disk deviates from a true plane by about 3 kpc (about 10%) in its outermost parts.