We now turn our attention to
galaxies, huge systems of containing billions and billions of stars.We now turn our attention to
galaxies, huge systems of containing billions and billions of stars.
We start with our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
| Discovery of the Milky Way
If it is so obvious, why do we talk about discovering it?? To the right, a section of the southern Milky Way from Arizona. The
Milky Way has always been an inspiring sight, and figures prominently in religion,
literature, and poetry (From T. and D. Hallas, http://www.astrophoto.com/and http://www.ngcic.com/MilkyWay/default.htm) |
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| William Herschel, in an idealized portrait showing the discovery of infrared light and one of his large telescopes in the background | -- and his sister Caroline, who worked with him on his astronomical projects and deserves a fair share of the credit for his discoveries. (from http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/PictDisplay/Herschel_Caroline.html) |
They thought that the Sun is located near the center of the Milky Way -- their counts showed a nearly symmetric drop-off in all directions from the Sun.
Herschels' Map of the Milky Way (the sun is the bright dot near the middle):
But, they were unaware of the existence of
interstellar dust that was cutting off their view toward the true center of the
system
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More star counts were available in ~1920 when Dutch astronomer, Kapteyn, made a modern version of Herschel's Milky Way model:
Kapteyn had the Sun slightly offset from the center of the Milky Way, but still didn't appreciate the deception caused by dust!
Why is it important to understand the Milky Way
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Harlow Shapley, around 1915, was interested in studying the distribution of globular clusters and what he might learn about the Milky Way from them. |
Globular star clusters:
| The Globular Cluster M9:
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Shapley took advantage of 2 facts:
1) globular clusters can be seen at relatively great distances
2) globular clusters contain RR Lyrae stars, a type of pulsating variable star that can be used to measure distances
| RR Lyrae stars are stars which have left the main sequence, but have not yet exhausted all of their nuclear fuels. They are in the mode of alternately expanding and contracting which causes their light to vary periodically and repeatably. |  |
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| Henrietta Leavitt had discovered the Period-Luminosity Relation while studying RR Lyrae stars which lie in the Large Magellanic Cloud and hence all at the same distance from us. (From AAVSO, APOD, http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap981027.html) | The brighter the star, the slower it changes.(From Nick Strobel Go to his site at www.astronomynotes.com for the updated and corrected version.) |
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By measuring the period of the star's
fluctuations, one could get its luminosity -- comparing the estimated luminosity with the
observed brightness and using the inverse square law, the distance to an RR Lyrae variable
can be calculated. Objects where we can estimate the luminosity in this way and use their
apparent brightnesses to determine distances are called standard candles.
From Clem Pryke, http://find.uchicago.edu/~pryke/compton/flyer.html |
The Period-Luminosity Relation gave Shapley a means of determining distances to globular clusters.
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Shapley found the globulars form a nearly spherical distribution around a point in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. Here is his projection of their positions onto the plane of the sky, with the center of the plot (at coordinate 0, 0 and indicated with the yellow/green arrow) in Sagitarius. |
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And here is his plot of their distances measured from the RR Lyrae stars and projected on a plane running from the sun (at 0,0, where there is an x -- and an added yellow/green circle) toward Sagitarius. |
Shapley reasoned that the location at the center of the globular cluster distribution must indicate the location of the center of the galaxy which he placed at a distance of nearly 30 kiloparsecs.
The modern distance is 8000 pcs -- again, Shapley was tricked because he didn't know about dust and how it was dimming the RR Lyrae stars on top of the inverse r2 law.
Anasazi painting of Crab supernova, Canyon de Chelly, http://www.colorado.edu/Conferences/chaco/tour/blanco.htm |
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John Flamsteed's constellation Andromeda, from Atlas Coelestis, http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/mapmaker.html#ptolemy |
Click to return to syllabus |
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| Click to return to Supernova Remnants | hypertext © G. H. Rieke |
Click to go to the Discovery of Galaxies |
