MODULE IN THE MILKY WAY GALAXY

Essay
1. How do you know that you live in a galaxy? We live in galaxy because the earth is part of
milky way even though if we see it in the sky it looks like we are observing it from the outside.

2. How do you know that our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, and what are the spiral arms?
The concentration of stars in a band strengthens the case that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy.
If we lived in an elliptical galaxy, we would observe our galaxy's stars spread out throughout the
sky rather than in a single band. And the spiral arms are rich in gas and dust, as well as
younger stars that shine brightly before collapsing.

3. What lies at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy?

At its center, the undetected to the naked eye and by direct measurements, it lies a
supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A. The Milky Way has the shape of a spiral and
rotates around its center, with long curling arms surrounding a slightly bulging disk.

4. How did the Milky Way Galaxy form and evolve?

Three astronomers start to present and describe the collapse of photo-galactic gas cloud into
present Milky Way Galaxy known as their initials ELS (Eggen Olin, Lynden-Bell Donald,
Sandage Allan) their model was based on the relative velocities and chemical compositions of
stars in populations I and II.
According to ELS model holds the Milky Way formed from the rapid collapse of a single cloud
gas. Stars formed early in the collapsed maintained the dynamics of the metal-poor gas and so
now travel around the Galaxy in elliptical orbits within the halo. As the cloud collapsed
preferentially along its rotational axis, it forms a disk that had been enriched with the metals
produced by the early generations of halo stars.
The "two-infall" model proposes that the halo and the disk of the Milky Way formed from
separate bodies of gas at different times in the Galaxy's evolution. The halo and the bulge
formed first from a metal-poor gas cloud with low angular momentum in the first one billion
years. In contrast, the disk formed later by the ‘infall’ of high-angular momentum gas. The disk
also appears to be evolving "inside-out," with the central-most regions forming first. The
formation of the solar neighborhood which began about 10 billion years ago, was completed
when the disk was about seven billion years old, whereas the outer parts of the disk continue to
grow even today with the ‘infall’ of extragalactic gas clouds.
Guide Questions
1. Why didn’t astronomers before Shapley realize how large galaxy is? At the time galaxies
weren't clear also astronomers were unable to determine stars luminosity and distance which is
key in determining galaxy size.
2. Why does self-sustaining star formation produce clouds of stars that look like
segments of spiral arms? Differential rotation drags the inner edge of the cloud ahead of the
outer edge. This stretches the star formation region out into an extended spiral structure.
3. Why must astronomers used infrared telescopes to observe the motions of stars
around Sgr A*? Because the dense clouds of dust and gas around the galactic center block the
view in other wavelengths.
4. Why do metal-poor stars have a wider range of orbital shapes than metal-rich stars like
the sun? Metal-poor stars formed longer ago when there wasn't as many supernovae to supply
them with metal, at this time the galaxy's motions weren't organized randomly shaping orbits.
5. What evidence contradicts the monolithic collapse hypothesis for the origin of our
galaxy? Monolithic says the galaxy formed from a large cloud that collapsed into a rotating disk
(top-down) but observations show things form bottom-up meaning they get bigger from
accretion and collision.