Types of Galaxies

Spiral Galaxies

A flattened disk of gas, and dust-rich material that orbits the nucleus of old red and yellow stars
Stars occur throughout the galaxy, but the brightest cluster of young blue and white stars found in the arms.
The stars and space objects rotate faster closer to the center than the ones father away.

Elliptical Galaxies

They range from being the biggest to smallest galaxies

Scientist believe that there must be a lot of Dark Matter holding the stars together
Show little structure other than a simple sphere
Almost all of the star yellow and red
Rarely any sign of star-forming gas and dust.
They are classified according to their shape
They are also classified by their size
Giant Elliptical: located at the center of a galaxy clusters
Intermediate Galaxy
Dwarf Elliptical

Lenticular Galaxies

At first they look like Elliptical, however around the nucleus there is gas
The gas would link them to Spiral galaxies, but the nucleus is considerably larger
The overall shape looks like a lens, which is the root word for Lenticular.
If you were to look at a lenticular galaxy face on, it could be mistakenly classified as a Elliptical galaxy
If you look at a Spiral galaxy with a large nucleus edge on, it could look like a Lenticular galaxy

Irregular Galaxies

Galaxies that do not fit into Spiral, Elliptical or Lenticular

These galaxies contain a lot of gas, dust, and blue stars
Many Irregular galaxies typically have great waves of star formation sweeping through the galaxies called
“starburst”
They frequently have vast, pink, hydrogen-emission nebulae where star formation is taking place
Some Irregular galaxies are colliding with other galaxies or being pulled apart by neighboring galaxies gravity.

Milky Way Galaxy

Our Solar System is located at the outer regions of a spiral galaxy named “Milky Way”. The nearest neighboring galaxy
is the Andromeda galaxy (M31).
The Milky Way Galaxy is an immense and very interesting place. Not only does it measure some 100000-120000 light-
years in diameter, it is home to our planet.
The ancient Greeks name that band galaxies kuklos, the “milky circle.” The Romans changed the name to via lactia,
meaning “Milky road or “milky way”.
It name “milky” is derived from its appearance as a dim glowing band arching across the night sky whose individual
stars cannot be distinguished by the naked eye.
Galileo`s telescope revealed that the glowing Milky Way is made up of stars, and later astronomers realized that the sun
must be located in a great wheel-shaped cloud of stars, which they called the star system.
In 1750 Thomas Wright used the term universe because, so far as known at the time, the Milky Way star system was the
entire universe.
For the longest time, the Milky Way was thought have 4 spiral arms, but newer surveys have determined that it actually
seems to just have 2 spiral arms, called Scutum-Centaurus and Carina-Sagittarius.
The spiral arms are formed from density waves that orbit around the Milky Way. As these density waves move through
an area, they compress the gas and dust, leading to a period of active formation for the region.
The Milky Way looks brightest toward the galactic, in the direction of Sagittarius.
The fact that the Milky Way divide the night sky into two roughly equal hemisphere indicates that the Solar System lies
near the galactic plane.
The Milky ways has relatively low surface brightness due to the gases and dust that fills the galactic disk.
It id further believed that our galaxy formed through the collision of smaller galaxies, early in the Universe.

Classified as a SBc (barred spiral galaxy)

Diameter: 100,000 light years Oldest known star: 13.2 billion years

Thickness: 1,000 light years Andromeda is classified as a SAb

Mass: 700,000,000,000 M (M= Solar Mass) Number of stars: 1 trillion

Number of Stars: 100-400 billion Larger than the Milky Way