The Milky Way

- Gas
- Dust
- Stars
- Planets
- “Stuff”

1 Galactic Year: 230 million years - 143 miles/s

● William Parsons - Anglo-Irish astronomer - The Third Earl of Rosee in Ireland discovered
“spiral nebulae” with 72-inch telescope

● Immanuel kant (1745) - proposed existence of “island universes” to describe the nebulae
○ Some though these spiral nebulae were within our nebulae
● “Great Debate” - 1920: harlow Shapley v. Heber D. Curtis
● Shapley argued that spiral nebulae were within the Milky Way
● Curtis argues that they were island universes

● Van Maanen- stars rotating in the pinwheel nebula “seeing what we want to see”
● Edwin Hubble: used the 100-inch reflecting telescope on Mt. WIlson
● Identified Cepheid variables in Andromeda nebula, determined that they were external to
our nebula

Cepheids (Pulsating stars)

Normal Spirals:
Irregular Galaxy:

Distances to Galaxies
- Galaxies are millions of parsecs away (1 parsec =
- Distance indicators: stars, star clusters, nebulae

Most distant detectable galaxies 10(9)(-10) light years away

- We are seeing the distant past
Hubble Law: Hubble determined that all but the nearest galaxies are receding from us
- By measuring Doppler shifts - Edwin Hubble
- Vr = H x d
- Vr in kilometers/see; d in megaparsecs;
- H = 50 - 100 km/see/megaparsec

Hard to “pin down” H (hubble constant); need H in order to get accurate distances to galaxies
Hubble-Lemaitre Law: Since 2018, the international astronomical union voted and changed the
hubble law to include the name of the belgian priest

Collisions of Galaxies:
- Merger Tree

Antennae Galaxy - 60 MLY

- Two galaxies in the process of collision

Stuff:
73% - Dark Energy
23% - Dark matter
- Rotation curve of galaxies
- Kepler Law: If most mass is near the center, lower velocity at higher distances, but
rotation velocity decreases more than expected the farther you go out; there is more
matter than we see
3.6% intergalactic gas
0.4% stars, etc.

Consists of:
- Low luminosity stars - doesn’t seem to be many of these
- Black holes - not enough X-ray emmissions
- Neutrinos
- Exotic particles?

Cosmology:
● The universe has no edge, no center
● The universe had a beginning - Big Bang - Time begins
○ When time started, thing started to happen
● The universe is expanding
● The universe is isotropic and homogeneous
● The universe is flat and is accelerating

Big Bang Theory:

● Universe began in a high temperature, high density state - not a single point, the big
bang filled entire volume of the universe
● Gamov (1948) - predicted that the early Big Bang was hot, emitted blackbody radiation -
in present era, we’d see a redshifted blackbody spectrum - not detected in visible
wavelength
● Penzias + Wilson (Early 1960s; won nobel prize, 1978) - radio measurements of the sky;
found “noise”
● “Noise” turned out to be cosmic microwave background radiation
 ● Cosmic background explorer 1989; confirmed radiation (T = 2.7K, in agreement with
predictions)
● Originally from gas clouds of T~3000K (1 million year after the BB)

A Timeline:
● At t-0; matter is in a state where physics is not well understood
● T=10 millionths of a second
● At this point, universe was entirely in the form of radiation
●
● As universe expands energy decreases - cools off
● Coolong/expanding continue until atomic nuclei form
● At t=2 min p + n - deuterium
● t=3 minutes: deuterium forms helium
● T=30 nuclear reactions stop
● T~10(6) years; Dominated by radiation; gas ionized
● At 1 million years, cool enough to form atoms; gas becomes transparent to radiation
(recombination) - T~3000K - this is the point where the CMB radiation originates
● Matter now dominates