CHAPTER 11

MILKY WAY GALAXY

Which galaxy is our home?
Virgo Super cluster
MILKY WAY GALAXY
 is a collection of stars, dust and gas.

 containing between 200 billion and 400

billion stars.

 Spiral galaxy
Milky way galaxy Spinning pinwheel
View from the outside
View from the Earth
Side view of milky way
 Without a telescope, we can see
about 6,000 stars from the
earth.

 For every stars you can see,

there are more than 20 million
you cannot see.

 Most of the stars are too faint,

too far away or blocked by
clouds of cosmic dust.
 Components
The milky way’s structure is
typical of a large spiral system.

 The nucleus

 Central bulge

 Disk

 Spiral arm

 Halo
 Nucleus
o The galactic nucleus makes up a
tiny component of the Galaxy; it
extends roughly 400 light-years Nucleus
from the Milky Way’s center.

o The nucleus is an extreme

region containing a
supermassive black hole
(Sagittarius A*) and extremely
high stellar densities (around 10
million stars).
 Central Budge
o The bulge is a round, dense
swarm of stars in the Milky
Way center approximately
10,000 light years across.

o The bulge is a round structure

made primarily of old stars, gas,
and dust.

o The outer parts of the bulge are

hard to distinguish from the
halo.
 Disk
o The disk is a thin distribution of
stars and gas orbiting the nucleus of
the Galaxy. The Milky Way’s disk is
100,000 light years across and 1,000
light years thick.

o The familiar spiral arms of the

Milky Way are located in the disk. It
contains mostly young stars, gas,
and dust, which are concentrated in
spiral arms.

o The disk is also where most of the

present-day star formation occurs--
our own adorable star nursery.
 Spiral Arms
o The spiral arms are curved
extensions that begin at the
bulge of a spiral galaxy, giving
it a “pinwheel” appearance.

o The spiral arms contain a lot of

gas, dust, and young blue stars.

o The solar system travels at an

average speed of 515,000 mph
(828,000 km/h).
 Halo

o the outermost extent of our

Galaxy (or another galaxy),
containing a sparse distribution
of stars and globular clusters in
a more or less spherical
distribution
 ROTATION OF THE
GALAXY
 The galaxy is rotating incredibly slowly. It takes
the sun 220 million years to complete a single
orbit around the galaxy.

 The galaxy rotation is happening because the

Milky Way is a flattened disk, in the same way
that the Solar System is flattened disk.
How long does it take the Galaxy
To rotate?
 It is spinning at 270 kilometers per second (168
miles per second) and takes about 200 million
years to complete one rotation.

HOW MANY TIMES HAS THE

GALAXY ROTATED?
 In the 4.6 billion years that the Sun and
planets have been here, they’ve only rotated
around the center of the galaxy about 20
times.
 MASS OF THE
 GALAXY
The mass of the Galaxies are found from
the orbital motion of their stars. Stars in a
massive galaxy will orbit faster than those in
a lower mass galaxy because the greater
gravity force of the massive galaxy will cause
larger accelerations of its stars.
Three techniques have been mainly used to
measure the mass of the galaxy;

o timing argument- measures the speed at

which two galaxies are approaching each
other and uses those dynamics to predict a
mass.
o abundance-matching studies- uses the
number of galaxies versus their circular
velocity and the Tully-Fischer relation to
obtain their luminosity, which can be used to
estimate their mass.

o dynamical methods- look at the velocity of

tracer objects such as globular clusters; any
mass distribution gives rise to a gravitational
potential that causes objects to move.
ORIGIN OF THE
MILKY WAY
 Milky Way is a huge collection of stars, dust
and gas.

 It is called a spiral galaxy because it is look

like a spinning pinwheel.

 The Sun is located on one of the spiral arms,

about 25,000 light years away from the
center of the galaxy.
 In the simplest telling, it held that our Milky
Way galaxy came together nearly 14billion
years ago when enormous clouds of gas and
dust coalesced under the force of gravity.

 Over time, two structures emerged; first is the

vast spherical ‘’halo” and later, a dense, bright
disk