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Sci Astro 8.FAQ
Sci Astro 8.FAQ
Sci Astro 8.FAQ
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Subject: [sci.astro] Galaxies (Astronomy Frequently Asked Questions) (8/8)
Followup-To: poster
From: lazio@spacenet.tn.cornell.edu
Summary: This posting address frequently asked questions about
galaxies, clusters, and QSO's.
Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.EDU
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Subject: Introduction
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Subject: Copyright
This FAQ is provided by the authors "as is," with all its faults.
Any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, any
implied warranties of merchantability, accuracy, or fitness for any
particular purpose, are disclaimed. If you use the information in
this document, in any way, you do so at your own risk.
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Subject: H.01 How many stars, galaxies, clusters, QSO's etc. in the Universe?
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Subject H.01.1 How many stars are there in the Milky Way?
Author: William Keel <keel@bildad.astr.ua.edu>
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We are on firmer ground with this one, since globular clusters are
fairly large and luminous. The only places where our census in the
Milky Way is incomplete are regions close to the galactic disk and
behind large amounts of absorbing dust, and for the fainter clusters
that are farthest from the Milky Way just now. The electronic version
of the 1981 Catalogue of Star Clusters and Associations. II. Globular
Clusters by J. Ruprecht, B. Balazs, and R.E. White lists 137 globular
clusters in and around the Milky Way. More recent discoveries have
added a handful, especially in the heavily reddened regions in the
inner Galaxy. As a rough estimate accounting for the regions that
cannot yet be searched adequately, our galaxy should have perhaps 200
total globulars, compared with the approximately 250 actually found
for the larger and brighter Andromeda galaxy.
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Subject: H.03 What is the Hubble constant? What is the best value?
Author: Steve Willner <swillner@cfa.harvard.edu>,
Joseph Lazio <jlazio@patriot.net>
The Hubble constant also has the interesting property of being related
to the age of the Universe, which undoubtedly explains some of the
interest in its value. It is a constant of proportionality between a
speed (measured in km/s) and a distance (measured in Mpc), so its
units are (km/s)/Mpc. Since kilometers and megaparsecs are both units
of distance, with the correct factor, we can convert megaparsecs to
kilometers, and we're left with a number whose units are (km/s)/km.
If we take 1/H, we see that it has units of seconds, that is 1/H is a
time. We might consider 1/H to be the time it takes for a galaxy
moving at a certain velocity (in km/s) to have moved a certain
distance (in Mpc). If the galaxies have always been moving exactly as
they now are, 1/H seconds ago all of them were on top of us!
In order to measure the Hubble constant, all one needs a distance and a
redshift to a galaxy that is distant enough that its peculiar velocity
does not matter. Measuring redshifts for galaxies is easy, but
measuring distances is hard. (See the next question.) The Hubble
constant is therefore not easy to measure, and it is not surprising that
there is controversy about its value. In fact, there are generally two
schools of thought: one group likes a Hubble constant around 55
(km/s)/Mpc, and another prefers values around 90 (km/s)/Mpc.
The linear relation between distance and recession velocity breaks down
for redshifts around 1 and larger (velocities around 2E5 km/s). The
true relation depends on the curvature of space, which is a whole other
topic in itself (and has no clear answer). The sense, though, is that
infinite redshift, corresponding to a recession velocity equal to the
speed of light, occurs at a finite distance. This distance is the
"radius of the observable Universe." Nothing more distant than this can
be observed, even in principle.
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The goal in all of this is to get out beyond the motions of our local
group of galaxies and determine distances for much more distant
objects which can reasonably be assumed to be moving along with the
expansion of the universe in the Big Bang cosmology. Since we know
their velocities from their redshifts, this would allow us to
determine Hubble's constant, currently the `holy grail' of
observational cosmology; if this were known we would know the
distances to _all_ distant galaxies directly from their recession
velocity. Sadly different methods of this determination, using
different steps along the distance ladder, give different results;
this leads to a commonly adopted range for H of between 50 and 100
km/s/Mpc, with rival camps supporting different values. There are a
number of ongoing attempts to reduce the complexity of the distance
ladder and thus the uncertainty in H. One has been the recent (and
continuing) use of the Hubble Space Telescope to measure Cepheid
variables directly in the Virgo cluster, thereby eliminating several
steps; this leads to a high (80--100) value of H, although with large
uncertainty (which should hopefully be reduced as more results
arrive). Other groups are working on eliminating the distance ladder,
with its large uncertainty and empirical assumptions, altogether, and
determining the distances to distant galaxies or clusters directly,
for example using the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect together with X-ray
data on distant clusters or using the time delays in gravitational
lenses. The early results tend to support lower values of H, around
50.
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Of the three, the proper distance is perhaps the most sensible of the
three. In this case, distance doesn't mean either when the light was
emitted or received, but how far the light travelled. Since the
Universe expands, we have been moving away from the emitting object so
the light is catching up to us (at a rate set by the rate of expansion
and our separation from the quasar or whatever at some fiducial
time). You can of course turn this distance into an extrapolated
distance (where the quasar or it descendant object is "today") but
that gets very slippery. Both special and general relativity must be
taken into account, so simultaneity, i.e., "today," has only a limited
meaning. Nearby galaxies are pretty much where we see them; for
example, the light from the Andromeda galaxy M31 has been travelling
only about 0.01% of the usually estimated age of the Universe, so its
distance from us would have changed by about that fraction, if nothing
but the Hubble expansion affected its measured distance (which is not
the case, because gravitational interactions between the Andromeda
galaxy and our Galaxy affect the relative velocity of the two
galaxies).
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It's often suggested that QSOs are not at the distances that would be
inferred from their redshifts and from Hubble's law; this would avoid
the enormous powers and necessity for general-relativistic physics in
the standard model. Many arguments of this type are flawed by a lack
of consideration of the other types of AGN; unless it's believed that
_no_ galaxy is at its redshift distance, i.e., that the whole concept
of redshift is wrong, then we know that there are objects very similar
to QSO's which _are_ at their redshift distances. Cosmological
theories which overthrow the whole idea of redshift and the big bang
are beyond the scope of this discussion, although several have been
proposed based on the apparent spatial association of objects with
very different redshifts.
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vt sin a v sin a
v(apparent) = ------------------ = ---------------
t(1 - (v/c) cos a) 1 - (v/c) cos a
^ O ^
| |\ |
| | \ |
| | \ vt cos a
| | a \ |
ct | \ |
| | \ |
| | B v
| | ^
| | ct - vt cos a
v | v
\_____I_____/
(Earth, radio telescope)