Chapter 20

The Milky Way-

A Normal Spiral
Galaxy

21st CENTURY ASTRONOMY

Fifth EDITION
Kay | Palen | Blumenthal
Milky Way

2016 W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

 Observing the Milky Way Galaxy, Part 1

There is a lot of dust in our galaxy.

Dust blocks light, making things fainter. They
look farther away.
Makes it difficult to find accurate distances to
objects that are affected by dust.
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 Observing the Milky Way Galaxy, Part 2

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, as

determined by our observations: SBbc.
The starry disk is evident in the night sky in
areas with low light pollution.
We can see dark lanes of dust and gas.
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 Globular Clusters
Globular clusters can help find distances in
our galaxy and to other galaxies.
Bound collections of up to a million stars.
Luminous and can be seen at great distances.
Globular clusters contain very old stars.
Low-mass stars have evolved to be RR Lyrae
standard candles.
Shapley used them to find the size of our galaxy
and saw that our Sun is not near the center.

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Structure of the Milky Way, Part 1

Observations of the orbiting

speeds of neutral hydrogen
gas have revealed a dark-
matter halo encompassing
the rest of the Milky Way,
stretching out to a distance
of 45,00050,000 pc from
the center.

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 Structure of the Milky Way, Part 2

Doppler shifts
from orbital
rotation give the
speed of gas and
stars in the disk.
The neutral
hydrogen gas
emits radio waves
with = 21 cm.

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 Rotation of the Disk

These speed measurements show a flat

rotation curve for the Milky Way.
About 90 percent of the matter in the Milky
Way is dark matter.
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 Ages and Chemical Composition

Globular clusters in the halo are older than

the open cluster stars in the disk.
Globular clusters can be 13 billion years
old.
We see no young globular clusters.
The processes that formed the two types of
clusters must have been very different.

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 Chemical Enrichment, Part 1

Stars are mostly hydrogen and helium.

Elements heavier than boron must have been
formed in stars.
The more massive elements found in a star, the
more prior star formation took place.
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 Chemical Enrichment, Part 2

New heavy elements are ejected into space

through supernovae.
New stars form with some heavy elements.
The abundance of heavy elements records the
history of star formation.
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 Chemical Enrichment, Part 3

We observe younger stars to have more heavy

elements than older stars.
Globular clusters can have as little as 0.5
percent of the amount of heavy elements that
disk stars like the Sun possess.
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 The First Stars

The Sun has about a 2 percent

concentration of heavy elements.
Even globular cluster stars have a small
amount of heavy elements.
There must have been at least one
generation of stars that existed prior to
globular clusters to process those
elements.
Those stars would have been very
massive, and therefore would have died
quickly.
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 Thin and Thick Disks

Younger stars appear close to the thin disk.

Thicker disk (~3,700 pc thick) has older stars
that were either captured from galactic mergers
or diffused from the thin disk.
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High-Velocity Stars
Some nearby stars are
members of the halo.
They are on orbits that
pass near the Sun, but
go far away from the
plane.
They have high radial
velocities or proper
motions.
They are called high-
velocity stars.

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 Magnetic Fields and Cosmic Rays

Cosmic rays are charged particles moving at

near the speed of light.
Can have very high energies.
Trapped by the Milky Ways magnetic field.
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Our Supermassive Black Hole
There is a black hole
at the Milky Ways
center, revealed by
its gravity.
Gas orbiting or
falling on to the
black hole produces
X-rays and gamma
rays.
About 4 106 M.

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 Galaxy Formation
The Milky Way offers clues to galaxy
formation.
All halo stars have some heavy elements,
so at least one prior generation of stars
must have existed.
Since halo stars were created from gas,
they were formed before interstellar gas
was all concentrated into the disk.
Later star formation was all in the disk.

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 Groups and Satellite Galaxies, Part 1

Galaxies are bound gravitationally to others.

Smallest are called galaxy groups.
The Milky Way is a member of the Local Group,
which has three giant galaxies.
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 Groups and Satellite Galaxies, Part 2
The Milky Way probably formed
by the merger of many smaller
protogalaxies.
Several of these are still
orbiting the Milky Way as
satellite galaxies, and the
Sagittarius Dwarf has been
disrupted, leaving streams of
stars.

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PROCESS OF SCIENCE
Since the
presence of dust
was unknown, its
effects could not
be accounted for.
Once included,
more accurate
distances were
found.

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 Check Your Understanding 20.1

Name three pieces of evidence in support of the theory

that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy.

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 Check Your Understanding 20.2

What parts of the Milky Way contain old stars, and

which parts contain young stars?

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 Check Your Understanding 20.3

Which property is detectable for both dark matter and

the supermassive black hole at the center of the
Milky Way?

a) their luminosities;
b) their temperatures;
c) their gravity;
d) their composition.

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 Check Your Understanding 20.4

Why is Andromeda now moving toward us?

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Working It Out 20.1Milky Way Mass Inside Suns Orbit

We can apply Newtons and Keplers laws to

calculate the mass of the Milky Way inside of
the Suns orbit.
The Suns orbital speed is ~220 km/s, at a
distance of 8,300 pc from the center.

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Working It Out 20.2Mass of Milky Ways Central Black Hole

Observing the stars orbiting the Milky Ways

supermassive black hole allows us to
calculate its mass.
Star S0-2 has a period of 15.8 years and a
semimajor axis of 1.5 x 1011 km.
Use Keplers third law, and the fact that the
stars mass is negligible to find the mass:

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 Nebraska Applet
Traffic Density Analogy

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(Requires an active Internet connection)
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 Nebraska Applet
Milky Way Rotational Velocity Explorer

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(Requires an active Internet connection)
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 Nebraska Applet
Milky Way Habitability Explorer

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(Requires an active Internet connection)
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 This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for Chapter 20

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21st CENTURY
ASTRONOMY
Fifth EDITION
Kay | Palen | Blumenthal