# Black Holes and Curved Spacetime

## Gravitational Wave Astronomy

### Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe what a gravitational wave is, what can produce it, and how fast it propagates
2. Understand the basic mechanisms used to detect gravitational waves
Another part of Einstein’s ideas about gravity can be tested as a way of checking the theory that underlies black holes. According to general relativity, the geometry of spacetime depends on where matter is located. Any rearrangement of matter—say, from a sphere to a sausage shape—creates a disturbance in spacetime. This disturbance is called a gravitational wave, and relativity predicts that it should spread outward at the speed of light. The big problem with trying to study such waves is that they are tremendously weaker than electromagnetic waves and correspondingly difficult to detect.

### Proof from a Pulsar

We’ve had indirect evidence for some time that gravitational waves exist. In 1974, astronomers Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse discovered a pulsar (with the designation PSR1913+16) orbiting another neutron star. Pulled by the powerful gravity of its companion, the pulsar is moving at about one-tenth the speed of light in its orbit.
According to general relativity, this system of stellar corpses should be radiating energy in the form of gravitational waves at a high enough rate to cause the pulsar and its companion to spiral closer together. If this is correct, then the orbital period should decrease (according to Kepler’s third law) by one ten-millionth of a second per orbit. Continuing observations showed that the period is decreasing by precisely this amount. Such a loss of energy in the system can be due only to the radiation of gravitational waves, thus confirming their existence. Taylor and Hulse shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics for this work.

### Direct Observations

Although such an indirect proof convinced physicists that gravitational waves exist, it is even more satisfying to detect the waves directly. What we need are phenomena that are powerful enough to produce gravitational waves with amplitudes large enough that we can measure them. Theoretical calculations suggest some of the most likely events that would give a burst of gravitational waves strong enough that our equipment on Earth could measure it:
1. the coalescence of two neutron stars in a binary system that spiral together until they merge
2. the swallowing of a neutron star by a black hole
3. the coalescence (merger) of two black holes
4. the implosion of a really massive star to form a neutron star or a black hole
5. the first “shudder” when space and time came into existence and the universe began
For the last four decades, scientists have been developing an audacious experiment to try to detect gravitational waves from a source on this list. The US experiment, which was built with collaborators from the UK, Germany, Australia and other countries, is named LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory). LIGO currently has two observing stations, one in Louisiana and the other in the state of Washington. The effects of gravitational waves are so small that confirmation of their detection will require simultaneous measurements by two widely separated facilities. Local events that might cause small motions within the observing stations and mimic gravitational waves—such as small earthquakes, ocean tides, and even traffic—should affect the two sites differently.
Each of the LIGO stations consists of two 4-kilometer-long, 1.2-meter-diameter vacuum pipes arranged in an L-shape. A test mass with a mirror on it is suspended by wire at each of the four ends of the pipes. Ultra-stable laser light is reflected from the mirrors and travels back and forth along the vacuum pipes (). If gravitational waves pass through the LIGO instrument, then, according to Einstein’s theory, the waves will affect local spacetime—they will alternately stretch and shrink the distance the laser light must travel between the mirrors ever so slightly. When one arm of the instrument gets longer, the other will get shorter, and vice versa.
The challenge of this experiment lies in that phrase “ever so slightly.” In fact, to detect a gravitational wave, the change in the distance to the mirror must be measured with an accuracy of one ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton. In 1972, Rainer Weiss of MIT wrote a paper suggesting how this seemingly impossible task might be accomplished.
A great deal of new technology had to be developed, and work on the laboratory, with funding from the National Science Foundation, began in 1979. A full-scale prototype to demonstrate the technology was built and operated from 2002 to 2010, but the prototype was not expected to have the sensitivity required to actually detect gravitational waves from an astronomical source. Advanced LIGO, built to be more precise with the improved technology developed in the prototype, went into operation in 2015—and almost immediately detected gravitational waves.
What LIGO found was gravitational waves produced in the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes (). The black holes had masses of 20 and 36 times the mass of the Sun, and the merger took place 1.3 billion years ago—the gravitational waves occurred so far away that it has taken that long for them, traveling at the speed of light, to reach us.
In the cataclysm of the merger, about three times the mass of the Sun was converted to energy (recall E = mc2). During the tiny fraction of a second for the merger to take place, this event produced power about 10 times the power produced by all the stars in the entire visible universe—but the power was all in the form of gravitational waves and hence was invisible to our instruments, except to LIGO. The event was recorded in Louisiana about 7 milliseconds before the detection in Washington—just the right distance given the speed at which gravitational waves travel—and indicates that the source was located somewhere in the southern hemisphere sky. Unfortunately, the merger of two black holes is not expected to produce any light, so this is the only observation we have of the event.
This detection by LIGO (and another one of a different black hole merger a few months later) opened a whole new window on the universe. One of the experimenters compared the beginning of gravitational wave astronomy to the era when silent films were replaced by movies with sound (comparing the vibration of spacetime during the passing of a gravitational wave to the vibrations that sound makes).
By the end of 2021, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration (Virgo is a gravitational wave detector operated by the European Gravitational Observatory in Italy) published a catalog that now included some 90 events. Most were mergers of two black holes, and most involved black holes with a range of masses detected only by gravitational waves (see ). In the most extreme merger, black holes with masses of 86 and 65 times the mass of the Sun merged to form a black hole with a mass of about 142 times the mass the Sun, and released energy equivalent to 9 times the mass of our Sun (remember E= mc2)—an enormous amount.

Astronomers are not yet sure how black holes in this unexpected mass range form. Bear in mind that the kind of black holes in binary star systems that we discussed in Evidence for Black Holes (and listed in ) have masses ranging from 4 to 15 times the mass of the Sun.

To be sure, a few mergers did involve black holes with stellar masses comparable to those of black holes in X-ray binary systems. In one case, for example, the merging black holes had masses of 14 and 8 times the mass of the Sun.
While astronomers can learn about the masses of objects involved in gravitational wave events, the challenge is to locate the event in the sky precisely. A single gravitational wave detector cannot determine accurately the direction to a gravitational wave source. Four comparable detectors operating simultaneously are required to localize a source of gravitational waves in every location in the sky. The first observing run with four detectors, including the two LIGO detectors, Virgo, and KAGRA in Japan, is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2022. LIGO India will be a fifth, thereby enhancing the probability that at least four detectors will be operational simultaneously. Experience has shown that the LIGO and Virgo detectors are down about 25 percent of the time because these complex systems are difficult to run.
A three-observatory network does provide a sharp location for events that occur in about half of all possible locations on the sky.
In late 2017, data from the LIGO and Virgo detectors provided an accurate position for what analysis showed was the spiraling together of two neutron stars with masses of 1.1 to 1.6 times the mass of the Sun (see The Death of Stars).

With an accurate location known, follow up observations with ground-based telescopes detected electromagnetic emission from a gravitational wave event for the first time. The observations showed that this source was located in NGC 4993, a galaxy at a distance of about 130 million light-years in the direction of the constellation Hydra. The Fermi satellite detected a flash of gamma rays at the same time and in the same direction, which confirms the long-standing hypothesis that mergers of neutron stars are progenitors of short gamma-ray bursts  (see The Mystery of Gamma-Ray Bursts).
Spectra showed that the merger ejected material with a mass of about 6 percent of the mass of the Sun at a speed of one-tenth the speed of light.

This material is rich in heavy elements, just as the theory of kilonovas (see The Mystery of Gamma-Ray Bursts) predicted. First estimates suggest that the merger produced about 200 Earth masses of gold, and around 500 Earth masses of platinum. This makes clear that neutron star mergers are a significant source of heavy elements. More such mergers are being found (see ) and they will improve estimates of the frequency at which neutron star mergers occur; it may well turn out that the vast majority of heavy elements have been created in such cataclysms.

No electromagnetic observations have been detected from the mergers of two black holes.

In June 2021, scientists from LIGO and Virgo announced the first detection of mergers between black holes and neutron stars, another of the really energetic events that we listed as possible sources for a detectable burst of gravitational waves.  Again, no electromagnetic waves from the two events were observed or expected, demonstrating the importance of using what we are now calling “multi-messenger astronomy” to understand the universe fully.
Observing the merger of black holes via gravitational waves means that we can now test Einstein’s general theory of relativity where its effects are very strong—close to black holes—and not weak, as they are near Earth. One remarkable result from these detections is that the observed signals so closely match the theoretical predictions made using Einstein’s theory. Once again, Einstein’s revolutionary idea is found to be the correct description of nature.

Because of the scientific significance of the observations of gravitational waves, three of the LIGO project leaders—Rainer Weiss of MIT, and Kip Thorne and Barry Barish of Caltech—were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017.

Ground-based gravitational-wave detectors can detect mergers of black holes with masses up to about 100 times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers would now like to look for the merger of distant supermassive black holes (see Supermassive Black Holes: What Quasars Really Are) with masses of thousands to millions of times larger, which might have occurred when the first generation of stars formed, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.  The gravitational waves emitted by mergers of supermassive black holes are so long that it is necessary to go to space to build an observatory large enough to detect them.
ESA (the European Space Agency), with contributions from NASA, is planning to launch a facility named LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) in 2034 to search for mergers of black holes with masses thousands to millions of times larger than the mass of the Sun. The experiment will consist of three spacecraft arranged in an equilateral triangle with sides 2.5 million km long, flying along an Earth-like heliocentric orbit. A test mass floats free inside each spacecraft, effectively in free-fall, while the spacecraft around it absorbs the effects of light pressure, solar wind particles, and anything that might perturb its orbit. Lasers will be used to measure very accurately the distances between the test masses. Changes in distance will then signal the passing of gravitational waves.
We should end by acknowledging that the ideas discussed in this chapter may seem strange and overwhelming, especially the first time you read them. The consequences of the general theory of relatively take some getting used to. But they make the universe more bizarre—and interesting—than you probably thought before you took this course.

### Key Concepts and Summary

General relativity predicts that the rearrangement of matter in space should produce gravitational waves. The existence of such waves was first confirmed in observations of a pulsar in orbit around another neutron star whose orbits were spiraling closer and losing energy in the form of gravitational waves. In 2015, LIGO found gravitational waves directly by detecting the signal produced by the merger of two stellar-mass black holes, opening a new window on the universe. Since then, many other gravitational wave signals have been found, signaling the mergers of both black holes and neutron stars.

### For Further Exploration

### Articles

### Black Holes

Charles, P. & Wagner, R. “Black Holes in Binary Stars: Weighing the Evidence.” Sky & Telescope (May 1996): 38. Excellent review of how we find stellar-mass black holes.
Gezari, S. “Star-Shredding Black Holes.” Sky & Telescope (June 2013): 16. When black holes and stars collide.
Jayawardhana, R. “Beyond Black.” Astronomy (June 2002): 28. On finding evidence of the existence of event horizons and thus black holes.
Nadis, S. “Black Holes: Seeing the Unseeable.” Astronomy (April 2007): 26. A brief history of the black hole idea and an introduction to potential new ways to observe them.
Psallis, D. & Sheperd, D. “The Black Hole Test.” Scientific American (September 2015): 74–79. The Event Horizon Telescope (a network of radio telescopes) will test some of the stranger predictions of general relativity for the regions near black holes. The September 2015 issue of Scientific American was devoted to a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the general theory of relativity.
Rees, M. “To the Edge of Space and Time.” Astronomy (July 1998): 48. Good, quick overview.
Talcott, R. “Black Holes in our Backyard.” Astronomy (September 2012): 44. Discussion of different kinds of black holes in the Milky Way and the 19 objects known to be black holes.

### Gravitational Waves

Bartusiak, M. “Catch a Gravity Wave.” Astronomy (October 2000): 54.
Gibbs, W. “Ripples in Spacetime.” Scientific American (April 2002): 62.
Haynes, K., & Betz, E. “A Wrinkle in Spacetime Confirms Einstein’s Gravitation.” Astronomy (May 2016): 22. On the direct detection of gravity waves.
Sanders, G., and Beckett, D. “LIGO: An Antenna Tuned to the Songs of Gravity.” Sky & Telescope (October 2000): 41.

### Websites

### Black Holes

Black Hole Encyclopedia: http://blackholes.stardate.org. From StarDate at the University of Texas McDonald Observatory.
Black Holes: http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes. NASA overview of black holes, along with links to the most recent news and discoveries.
Introduction to Black Holes: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18348-introduction-black-holes/. Basic information from New Scientist magazine.
Virtual Trips into Black Holes and Neutron Stars: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/rjn_bht.html. By Robert Nemiroff at Michigan Technological University.

### Gravitational Waves

Advanced LIGO: https://www.advancedligo.mit.edu. The full story on this gravitational wave observatory.
eLISA: https://www.elisascience.org.
Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein’s Theory: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html. New York Times article and videos on the discovery of gravitational waves.
Gravitational Waves Discovered from Colliding Black Holes: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gravitational-waves-discovered-from-colliding-black-holes1. Scientific American coverage of the discovery of gravitational waves (note the additional materials available in the menu at the right).
LIGO Caltech: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu.

### Videos

### Black Holes

Black Holes: The End of Time or a New Beginning?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgtJRsdKe6Q. 2012 Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture by Roger Blandford (1:29:52).
Death by Black Hole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1iJXOUMJpg. Neil deGrasse Tyson explains spaghettification with only his hands (5:34).
Hearts of Darkness: Black Holes in Space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tiAOldypLk. 2010 Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture by Alex Filippenko (1:56:11).

### Gravitational Waves

Journey of a Gravitational Wave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlDtXIBrAYE. Introduction from LIGO Caltech (2:55).
LIGO’s First Detection of Gravitational Waves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw-i_VKd6Wo. Explanation and animations from PBS Digital Studio (9:31).
Two Black Holes Merge into One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_88S8DWbcU. Simulation from LIGO Caltech (0:35).
What the Discovery of Gravitational Waves Means: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMVAgCPYYHY. TED Talk by Allan Adams (10:58).

### Collaborative Group Activities

1. A computer science major takes an astronomy course like the one you are taking and becomes fascinated with black holes. Later in life, he founds his own internet company and becomes very wealthy when it goes public. He sets up a foundation to support the search for black holes in our Galaxy. Your group is the allocation committee of this foundation. How would you distribute money each year to increase the chances that more black holes will be found?
2. Suppose for a minute that stars evolve without losing any mass at any stage of their lives. Your group is given a list of binary star systems. Each binary contains one main-sequence star and one invisible companion. The spectral types of the main-sequence stars range from spectral type O to M. Your job is to determine whether any of the invisible companions might be black holes. Which ones are worth observing? Why? (Hint: Remember that in a binary star system, the two stars form at the same time, but the pace of their evolution depends on the mass of each star.)
3. You live in the far future, and the members of your group have been convicted (falsely) of high treason. The method of execution is to send everyone into a black hole, but you get to pick which one. Since you are doomed to die, you would at least like to see what the inside of a black hole is like—even if you can’t tell anyone outside about it. Would you choose a black hole with a mass equal to that of Jupiter or one with a mass equal to that of an entire galaxy? Why? What would happen to you as you approached the event horizon in each case? (Hint: Consider the difference in force on your feet and your head as you cross over the event horizon.)
4. General relativity is one of the areas of modern astrophysics where we can clearly see the frontiers of human knowledge. We have begun to learn about black holes and warped spacetime recently and are humbled by how much we still don’t know. Research in this field is supported mostly by grants from government agencies. Have your group discuss what reasons there are for our tax dollars to support such “far out” (seemingly impractical) work. Can you make a list of “far out” areas of research in past centuries that later led to practical applications? What if general relativity does not have many practical applications? Do you think a small part of society’s funds should still go to exploring theories about the nature of space and time?
5. Once you all have read this chapter, work with your group to come up with a plot for a science fiction story that uses the properties of black holes.
6. Black holes seem to be fascinating not just to astronomers but to the public, and they have become part of popular culture. Searching online, have group members research examples of black holes in music, advertising, cartoons, and the movies, and then make a presentation to share the examples you found with the whole class.
7. As mentioned in the Gravity and Time Machines feature box in this chapter, the film Interstellar has a lot of black hole science in its plot and scenery. That’s because astrophysicist Kip Thorne at Caltech had a big hand in writing the initial treatment for the movie, and later producing it. Get your group members together (be sure you have popcorn) for a viewing of the movie and then try to use your knowledge of black holes from this chapter to explain the plot. (Note that the film also uses the concept of a wormhole, which we don’t discuss in this chapter. A wormhole is a theoretically possible way to use a large, spinning black hole to find a way to travel from one place in the universe to another without having to go through regular spacetime to get there.)

### Review Questions

### Thought Questions

### Figuring for Yourself


# The Milky Way Galaxy

## Thinking Ahead

Today, we know that our Sun is just one of the many billions of stars that make up the huge cosmic island we call the Milky Way Galaxy. How can we “weigh” such an enormous system of stars and measure its total mass?
One of the most striking features you can see in a truly dark sky—one without light pollution—is the band of faint white light called the Milky Way, which stretches from one horizon to the other. The name comes from an ancient Greek legend that compared its faint white splash of light to a stream of spilled milk. But folktales differ from culture to culture: one East African tribe thought of the hazy band as the smoke of ancient campfires, several Native American stories tell of a path across the sky traveled by sacred animals, and in Siberia, the diffuse arc was known as the seam of the tent of the sky.
In 1610, Galileo made the first telescopic survey of the Milky Way and discovered that it is composed of a multitude of individual stars. Today, we know that the Milky Way comprises our view inward of the huge cosmic pinwheel that we call the Milky Way Galaxy and that is our home. Moreover, our Galaxy is now recognized as just one galaxy among many billions of other galaxies in the cosmos.


# The Milky Way Galaxy

## The Architecture of the Galaxy

### Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Explain why William and Caroline Herschel concluded that the Milky Way has a flattened structure centered on the Sun and solar system
2. Describe the challenges of determining the Galaxy’s structure from our vantage point within it
3. Identify the main components of the Galaxy
The Milky Way Galaxy surrounds us, and you might think it is easy to study because it is so close. However, the very fact that we are embedded within it presents a difficult challenge. Suppose you were given the task of mapping New York City. You could do a much better job from a helicopter flying over the city than you could if you were standing in Times Square. Similarly, it would be easier to map our Galaxy if we could only get a little way outside it, but instead we are trapped inside and way out in its suburbs—far from the galactic equivalent of Times Square.

### Herschel Measures the Galaxy

In 1785, William Herschel () made the first important discovery about the architecture of the Milky Way Galaxy. Using a large reflecting telescope that he had built, William and his sister Caroline counted stars in different directions of the sky. They found that most of the stars they could see lay in a flattened structure encircling the sky, and that the numbers of stars were about the same in any direction around this structure. Herschel therefore concluded that the stellar system to which the Sun belongs has the shape of a disk or wheel (he might have called it a Frisbee except Frisbees hadn’t been invented yet), and that the Sun must be near the hub of the wheel ().
To understand why Herschel reached this conclusion, imagine that you are a member of a band standing in formation during halftime at a football game. If you count the band members you see in different directions and get about the same number each time, you can conclude that the band has arranged itself in a circular pattern with you at the center. Since you see no band members above you or underground, you know that the circle made by the band is much flatter than it is wide.
We now know that Herschel was right about the shape of our system, but wrong about where the Sun lies within the disk. As we saw in Between the Stars: Gas and Dust in Space, we live in a dusty Galaxy. Because interstellar dust absorbs the light from stars, Herschel could see only those stars within about 6000 light-years of the Sun. Today we know that this is a very small section of the entire 100,000-light-year-diameter disk of stars that makes up the Galaxy.

### Disks and Haloes

With modern instruments, astronomers can now penetrate the “smog” of the Milky Way by studying radio and infrared emissions from distant parts of the Galaxy. Measurements at these wavelengths (as well as observations of other galaxies like ours) have given us a good idea of what the Milky Way would look like if we could observe it from a distance.
 sketches what we would see if we could view the Galaxy face-on and edge-on. The brightest part of the Galaxy consists of a thin, circular, rotating disk of stars distributed across a region about 100,000 light-years in diameter and about 2000 light-years thick. (Given how thin the disk is, perhaps a CD is a more appropriate analogy than a wheel.) The very youngest stars, and the dust and gas from which stars form, are found typically within 100 light-years of the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy. The mass of the interstellar matter is about 15% of the mass of the stars in this disk.
As the diagram in  shows, the stars, gas, and dust are not spread evenly throughout the disk but are concentrated into a central bar and a series of spiral arms. Recent infrared observations have confirmed that the central bar is composed mostly of old yellow-red stars. The two main spiral arms appear to connect with the ends of the bar. They are highlighted by the blue light from young hot stars. We know many other spiral galaxies that also have bar-shaped concentrations of stars in their central regions; for that reason they are called barred spirals.  shows two other galaxies—one without a bar and one with a strong bar—to give you a basis for comparison to our own. We will describe our spiral structure in more detail shortly. The Sun is located about halfway between the center of the Galaxy and the edge of the disk and only about 70 light-years above its central plane.
Our thin disk of young stars, gas, and dust is embedded in a thicker but more diffuse disk of older stars; this thicker disk extends about 1000 light-years above and 1000 light-years below the midplane of the thin disk and contains only about 5% as much mass as the thin disk. The stars thin out with distance from the galactic plane and don’t have a sharp edge.  Approximately 2/3 of the stars in the thick disk are within 1000 light-years of midplane.
Close in to the galactic center (within about 10,000 light-years), the stars are no longer confined to the disk but form a central bulge (or nuclear bulge). When we observe with visible light, we can glimpse the stars in the bulge only in those rare directions where there happens to be relatively little interstellar dust. The first picture that actually succeeded in showing the bulge as a whole was taken at infrared wavelengths ().
The fact that much of the bulge is obscured by dust makes its shape difficult to determine. For a long time, astronomers assumed it was spherical. However, infrared images and other data indicate that the bulge is about two times longer than it is wide, and shaped rather like a peanut. The relationship between this elongated inner bulge and the larger bar of stars remains uncertain. At the very center of the nuclear bulge is a tremendous concentration of matter, which we will discuss later in this chapter.
In our Galaxy, the thin and thick disks and the nuclear bulge are embedded in a spherical halo of very old, faint stars that extends to a distance of at least 150,000 light-years from the galactic center. Most of the globular clusters are also found in this halo.
The mass in the Milky Way extends even farther out, well beyond the boundary of the luminous stars to a distance of at least 200,000 light-years from the center of the Galaxy. This invisible mass has been give the name dark matter because it emits no light and cannot be seen with any telescope. Its composition is unknown, and it can be detected only because of its gravitational effects on the motions of luminous matter that we can see. We know that this extensive dark matter halo exists because of its effects on the orbits of distant star clusters and other dwarf galaxies that are associated with the Galaxy. This mysterious halo will be a subject of the section on The Mass of the Galaxy, and the properties of dark matter will be discussed more in the chapter on The Big Bang.
Some vital statistics of the thin and thick disks and the stellar halo are given in , with an illustration in . Note particularly how the ages of stars correlate with where they are found. As we shall see, this information holds important clues to how the Milky Way Galaxy formed.
Establishing this overall picture of the Galaxy from our dust-shrouded viewpoint inside the thin disk has been one of the great achievements of modern astronomy (and one that took decades of effort by astronomers working with a wide range of telescopes). One thing that helped enormously was the discovery that our Galaxy is not unique in its characteristics. There are many other flat, spiral-shaped islands of stars, gas, and dust in the universe. For example, the Milky Way somewhat resembles the Andromeda galaxy, which, at a distance of about 2.3 million light-years, is our nearest neighboring giant spiral galaxy. Just as you can get a much better picture of yourself if someone else takes the photo from a distance away, pictures and other diagnostic observations of nearby galaxies that resemble ours have been vital to our understanding of the properties of the Milky Way.

### Key Concepts and Summary

The Milky Way Galaxy consists of a thin disk containing dust, gas, and young and old stars; a spherical halo containing populations of very old stars, including RR Lyrae variable stars and globular star clusters; a thick, more diffuse disk with stars that have properties intermediate between those in the thin disk and the halo; a peanut-shaped nuclear bulge of mostly old stars around the center; and a supermassive black hole at the very center. The Sun is located roughly halfway out of the Milky Way, about 26,000 light-years from the center.


# The Milky Way Galaxy

## Spiral Structure

### Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe the structure of the Milky Way Galaxy and how astronomers discovered it
2. Compare theoretical models for the formation of spiral arms in disk galaxies
Astronomers were able to make tremendous progress in mapping the spiral structure of the Milky Way after the discovery of the 21-cm line that comes from cool hydrogen (see Between the Stars: Gas and Dust in Space). Remember that the obscuring effect of interstellar dust prevents us from seeing stars at large distances in the disk at visible wavelengths. However, radio waves of 21-cm wavelength pass right through the dust, enabling astronomers to detect hydrogen atoms throughout the Galaxy. More recent surveys of the infrared emission from stars in the disk have provided a similar dust-free perspective of our Galaxy’s stellar distribution. Despite all this progress over the past fifty years, we are still just beginning to pin down the precise structure of our Galaxy.

### The Arms of the Milky Way

Our radio observations of the disk’s gaseous component indicate that the Galaxy has two major spiral arms that emerge from the bar and several fainter arms and shorter spurs. You can see a recently assembled map of our Galaxy’s arm structure—derived from studies in the infrared—in .
The Sun is near the inner edge of a short arm (or spur) called the Orion-Cygnus Arm, which is about 10,000 light-years long and contains such conspicuous features as the Cygnus Rift (the great dark nebula in the summer Milky Way) and the bright Orion Nebula.  shows a few other objects that share this small section of the Galaxy with us and are easy to see. Remember, the farther away we try to look from our own arm, the more the dust in the Galaxy builds up and makes it hard to see with visible light.

### Formation of Spiral Structure

At the Sun’s distance from its center, the Galaxy does not rotate like a solid wheel or a CD inside your player. Instead, the way individual objects turn around the center of the Galaxy is more like the solar system. Stars, as well as the clouds of gas and dust, obey Kepler’s third law. Objects farther from the center take longer to complete an orbit around the Galaxy than do those closer to the center. In other words, stars (and interstellar matter) in larger orbits in the Galaxy trail behind those in smaller ones. This effect is called differential galactic rotation.
Differential rotation would appear to explain why so much of the material in the disk of the Milky Way is concentrated into elongated features that resemble spiral arms. No matter what the original distribution of the material might be, the differential rotation of the Galaxy can stretch it out into spiral features.  shows the development of spiral arms from two irregular blobs of interstellar matter. Notice that as the portions of the blobs closest to the galactic center move faster, those farther out trail behind.
But this picture of spiral arms presents astronomers with an immediate problem. If that’s all there were to the story, differential rotation—over the roughly 13-billion-year history of the Galaxy—would have wound the Galaxy’s arms tighter and tighter until all semblance of spiral structure had disappeared. But did the Milky Way actually have spiral arms when it formed 13 billion years ago? And do spiral arms, once formed, last for that long a time?
With the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope, it has become possible to observe the structure of very distant galaxies and to see what they were like shortly after they began to form more than 13 billion years ago. What the observations show is that galaxies in their infancy had bright, clumpy star-forming regions, but no regular spiral structure.
Over the next few billion years, the galaxies began to “settle down.” The galaxies that were to become spirals lost their massive clumps and developed a central bulge. The turbulence in these galaxies decreased, rotation began to dominate the motions of the stars and gas, and stars began to form in a much quieter disk. Smaller star-forming clumps began to form fuzzy, not-very-distinct spiral arms. Bright, well-defined spiral arms began to appear only when the galaxies were about 3.6 billion years old. Initially, there were two well-defined arms. Multi-armed structures in galaxies like we see in the Milky Way appeared only when the universe was about 8 billion years old.
We will discuss the history of galaxies in more detail in The Evolution and Distribution of Galaxies. But, even from our brief discussion, you can get the sense that the spiral structures we now observe in mature galaxies have come along later in the full story of how things develop in the universe.
Scientists have used supercomputer calculations to model the formation and evolution of the arms. These calculations follow the motions of up to 100 million “star particles” to see whether gravitational forces can cause them to form spiral structure. What these calculations show is that giant molecular clouds (which we discussed in Between the Stars: Gas and Dust in Space) have enough gravitational influence over their surroundings to initiate the formation of structures that look like spiral arms. These arms then become self-perpetuating and can survive for at least several billion years. The arms may change their brightness over time as star formation comes and goes, but they are not temporary features. The concentration of matter in the arms exerts sufficient gravitational force to keep the arms together over long periods of time.

### Key Concepts and Summary

The gaseous distribution in the Galaxy’s disk has two main spiral arms that emerge from the ends of the central bar, along with several fainter arms and short spurs; the Sun is located in one of those spurs. Measurements show that the Galaxy does not rotate as a solid body, but instead its stars and gas follow differential rotation, such that the material closer to the galactic center completes its orbit more quickly. Observations show that galaxies like the Milky Way take several billion years after they began to form to develop spiral structure.


# The Milky Way Galaxy

## The Mass of the Galaxy

### Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe historical attempts to determine the mass of the Galaxy
2. Interpret the observed rotation curve of our Galaxy to suggest the presence of dark matter whose distribution extends well beyond the Sun’s orbit
When we described the sections of the Milky Way, we said that the stars are now known to be surrounded by a much larger halo of invisible matter. Let’s see how this surprising discovery was made.

### Kepler Helps Weigh the Galaxy

The Sun, like all the other stars in the Galaxy, orbits the center of the Milky Way. Our star’s orbit is nearly circular and lies in the Galaxy’s disk. The speed of the Sun in its orbit is about 200 kilometers per second, which means it takes us approximately 225 million years to go once around the center of the Galaxy. We call the period of the Sun’s revolution the galactic year. It is a long time compared to human time scales; during the entire lifetime of Earth, only about 20 galactic years have passed. This means that we have gone only a tiny fraction of the way around the Galaxy in all the time that humans have gazed into the sky.
We can use the information about the Sun’s orbit to estimate the mass of the Galaxy (just as we could “weigh” the Sun by monitoring the orbit of a planet around it—see Orbits and Gravity). Let’s assume that the Sun’s orbit is circular and that the Galaxy is roughly spherical, (we know the Galaxy is shaped more like a disk, but to simplify the calculation we will make this assumption, which illustrates the basic approach). Long ago, Newton showed that if you have matter distributed in the shape of a sphere, then it is simple to calculate the pull of gravity on some object just outside that sphere: you can assume that gravity acts as if all the matter were concentrated at a point in the center of the sphere. For our calculation, then, we can assume that all the mass that lies inward of the Sun’s position is concentrated at the center of the Galaxy, and that the Sun orbits that point from a distance of about 26,000 light-years.
This is the sort of situation to which Kepler’s third law (as modified by Newton) can be directly applied. Plugging numbers into Kepler’s formula, we can calculate the sum of the masses of the Galaxy and the Sun. However, the mass of the Sun is completely trivial compared to the mass of the Galaxy. Thus, for all practical purposes, the result (about 100 billion times the mass of the Sun) is the mass of the Milky Way. More sophisticated calculations based on more sophisticated models give a similar result.
Our estimate tells us how much mass is contained in the volume inside the Sun’s orbit. This is a good estimate for the total mass of the Galaxy only if hardly any mass lies outside the Sun’s orbit. For many years astronomers thought this assumption was reasonable. The number of bright stars and the amount of luminous matter (meaning any material from which we can detect electromagnetic radiation) both drop off dramatically at distances of more than about 30,000 light-years from the galactic center. Little did we suspect how wrong our assumption was.

### A Galaxy of Mostly Invisible Matter

In science, what seems to be a reasonable assumption can later turn out to be wrong (which is why we continue to do observations and experiments every chance we get). There is a lot more to the Milky Way than meets the eye (or our instruments). While there is relatively little luminous matter beyond 30,000 light-years, we now know that a lot of invisible matter exists at great distances from the galactic center.
We can understand how astronomers detected this invisible matter by remembering that according to Kepler’s third law, objects orbiting at large distances from a massive object will move more slowly than objects that are closer to that central mass. In the case of the solar system, for example, the outer planets move more slowly in their orbits than the planets close to the Sun.
There are a few objects, including globular clusters and some nearby small satellite galaxies, that lie well outside the luminous boundary of the Milky Way. If most of the mass of our Galaxy were concentrated within the luminous region, then these very distant objects should travel around their galactic orbits at lower speeds than, for example, the Sun does.
It turns out, however, that the few objects seen at large distances from the luminous boundary of the Milky Way Galaxy are not moving more slowly than the Sun. There are some globular clusters and RR Lyrae stars between 30,000 and 150,000 light-years from the center of the Galaxy, and their orbital velocities are even greater than the Sun’s ().
What do these higher speeds mean? Kepler’s third law tells us how fast objects must orbit a source of gravity if they are neither to fall in (because they move too slowly) nor to escape (because they move too fast). If the Galaxy had only the mass calculated by Kepler, then the high-speed outer objects should long ago have escaped the grip of the Milky Way. The fact that they have not done so means that our Galaxy must have more gravity than can be supplied by the luminous matter—in fact, a lot more gravity. The high speed of these outer objects tells us that the source of this extra gravity must extend outward from the center far beyond the Sun’s orbit.
If the gravity were supplied by stars or by something else that gives off radiation, we should have spotted this additional outer material long ago. We are therefore forced to the reluctant conclusion that this matter is invisible and has, except for its gravitational pull, gone entirely undetected.
Studies of the motions of the most remote globular clusters and the small galaxies that orbit our own show that the total mass of the Galaxy is at least  MSun, which is about twenty times greater than the amount of luminous matter. Moreover, the dark matter (as astronomers have come to call the invisible material) extends to a distance of at least 200,000 light-years from the center of the Galaxy. Observations indicate that this dark matter halo is almost but not quite spherical.
The obvious question is: what is the dark matter made of? Let’s look at a list of “suspects” taken from our study of astronomy so far. Since this matter is invisible, it clearly cannot be in the form of ordinary stars. And it cannot be gas in any form (remember that there has to be a lot of it). If it were neutral hydrogen gas, its 21-cm wavelength spectral-line emission would have been detected as radio waves. If it were ionized hydrogen, it should be hot enough to emit visible radiation. If a lot of hydrogen atoms out there had combined into hydrogen molecules, these should produce dark features in the ultraviolet spectra of objects lying beyond the Galaxy, but such features have not been seen. Nor can the dark matter consist of interstellar dust, since in the required quantities, the dust would significantly obscure the light from distant galaxies.
What are our other possibilities? The dark matter cannot be a huge number of black holes (of stellar mass) or old neutron stars, since interstellar matter falling onto such objects would produce more X-rays than are observed. Also, recall that the formation of black holes and neutron stars is preceded by a substantial amount of mass loss, which scatters heavy elements into space to be incorporated into subsequent generations of stars. If the dark matter consisted of an enormous number of any of those objects, they would have blown off and recycled a lot of heavier elements over the history of the Galaxy. In that case, the young stars we observe in our Galaxy today would contain much greater abundances of heavy elements than they actually do.
Brown dwarfs and lone Jupiter-like planets have also been ruled out. First of all, there would have to be an awful lot of them to make up so much dark matter. But we have a more direct test of whether so many low-mass objects could actually be lurking out there. As we learned in Black Holes and Curved Spacetime, the general theory of relativity predicts that the path traveled by light is changed when it passes near a concentration of mass. It turns out that when the two objects appear close enough together in the sky, the mass closer to us can bend the light from farther away. With just the right alignment, the image of the more distant object also becomes significantly brighter. By looking for the temporary brightening that occurs when a dark matter object in our own Galaxy moves across the path traveled by light from stars in the Magellanic Clouds, astronomers have now shown that the dark matter cannot be made up of a lot of small objects with masses between one-millionth and one-tenth the mass of the Sun.
What’s left? One possibility is that the dark matter is composed of exotic subatomic particles of a type not yet detected on Earth. Very sophisticated (and difficult) experiments are now under way to look for such particles. Stay tuned to see whether anything like that turns up.
We should add that the problem of dark matter is by no means confined to the Milky Way. Observations show that dark matter must also be present in other galaxies (whose outer regions also orbit too fast “for their own good”—they also have flat rotation curves). As we will see, dark matter even exists in great clusters of galaxies whose members are now known to move around under the influence of far more gravity than can be accounted for by luminous matter alone.
Stop a moment and consider how astounding the conclusion we have reached really is. Perhaps as much as 95% of the mass in our Galaxy (and many other galaxies) is not only invisible, but we do not even know what it is made of. The stars and raw material we can observe may be merely the tip of the cosmic iceberg; underlying it all may be other matter, perhaps familiar, perhaps startlingly new. Understanding the nature of this dark matter is one of the great challenges of astronomy today; you will learn more about this in A Universe of (Mostly) Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

### Key Concepts and Summary

The Sun revolves completely around the galactic center in about 225 million years (a galactic year). The mass of the Galaxy can be determined by measuring the orbital velocities of stars and interstellar matter. The total mass of the Galaxy is about  MSun. As much as 95% of this mass consists of dark matter that emits no electromagnetic radiation and can be detected only because of the gravitational force it exerts on visible stars and interstellar matter. This dark matter is located mostly in the Galaxy’s halo; its nature is not well understood at present.


# The Milky Way Galaxy

## The Center of the Galaxy

### Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe the radio and X-ray observations that indicate energetic phenomena are occurring at the galactic center
2. Explain what has been revealed by high-resolution near-infrared imaging of the galactic center
3. Discuss how these near-infrared images, when combined with Kepler’s third law of motion, can be used to derive the mass of the central gravitating object
At the beginning of this chapter, we hinted that the core of our Galaxy contains a large concentration of mass. In fact, we now have evidence that the very center contains a black hole with a mass equivalent to 4.6 million Suns and that all this mass fits within a sphere that has less than the diameter of Mercury’s orbit. Such monster black holes are called supermassive black holes by astronomers, to indicate that the mass they contain is far greater than that of the typical black hole created by the death of a single star. It is amazing that we have very convincing evidence that this black hole really does exist. After all, recall from the chapter on Black Holes and Curved Spacetime that we cannot see a black hole directly because by definition it radiates no energy. And we cannot even see into the center of the Galaxy in visible light because of absorption by the interstellar dust that lies between us and the galactic center. Light from the central region of the Galaxy is dimmed by a factor of a trillion (1012) by all this dust.
Fortunately, we are not so blind at other wavelengths. Infrared and radio radiation, which have long wavelengths compared to the sizes of the interstellar dust grains, flow unimpeded past the dust particles and so reach our telescopes with hardly any dimming. In fact, the very bright radio source in the nucleus of the Galaxy, now known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced “Sagittarius A-star” and abbreviated Sgr A*), was the first cosmic radio source astronomers discovered.

### A Journey toward the Center

Let’s take a voyage to the mysterious heart of our Galaxy and see what’s there.  is a radio image of a region about 1500 light-years across, centered on Sagittarius A, a bright radio source that contains the smaller Sagittarius A*. Much of the radio emission comes from hot gas heated either by clusters of hot stars (the stars themselves do not produce radio emission and can’t be seen in the image) or by supernova blast waves. Most of the hollow circles visible on the radio image are supernova remnants. The other main source of radio emission is from electrons moving at high speed in regions with strong magnetic fields. The bright thin arcs and “threads” on the figure show us where this type of emission is produced.
Now let’s focus in on the central region using a more energetic form of electromagnetic radiation.  shows the X-ray emission from a smaller region 400 light-years wide and 900 light-years across centered in Sagittarius A*. Seen in this picture are hundreds of hot white dwarfs, neutron stars, and stellar black holes with accretion disks glowing with X-rays. The diffuse haze in the picture is emission from gas that lies among the stars and is at a temperature of 10 million K.
As we approach the center of the Galaxy, we find the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A. There are also thousands of stars within a few lightyears of Sagittarius A*. Most of these are old, reddish main-sequence stars. But there are also about a hundred hot OB stars that must have formed within the last few million years. There is as yet no good explanation for how stars could have formed recently so close to a supermassive black hole. Perhaps they formed in a dense cluster of stars that was originally at a larger distance from the black hole and subsequently migrated closer.
There is currently no star formation at the galactic center, but there is lots of dust and molecular gas that is revolving around the black hole, along with some ionized gas streamers that are heated by the hot stars.  is a radio map that shows these gas streamers.

### Finding the Heart of the Galaxy

Just what is Sagittarius A*, which lies right at the center our Galaxy? To establish that there really is a black hole there, we must show that there is a very large amount of mass crammed into a very tiny volume. As we saw in Black Holes and Curved Spacetime, proving that a black hole exists is a challenge because the black hole itself emits no radiation. What astronomers must do is prove that a black hole is the only possible explanation for our observations—that a small region contains far more mass than could be accounted for by a very dense cluster of stars or something else made of ordinary matter.
To put some numbers with this discussion, the radius of the event horizon of a galactic black hole with a mass of about 4 million MSun would be only about 17 times the size of the Sun—the equivalent of a single red giant star. The corresponding density within this region of space would be much higher than that of any star cluster or any other ordinary astronomical object. Therefore, we must measure both the diameter of Sagittarius A* and its mass. Both radio and infrared observations are required to give us the necessary evidence.
First, let’s look at how the mass can be measured. If we zero in on the inner few light-days of the Galaxy with an infrared telescope equipped with adaptive optics, we see a region crowded with individual stars (). These stars have now been observed for almost two decades, and astronomers have detected their rapid orbital motions around the very center of the Galaxy.
If we combine observations of their periods and the size of their orbits with Kepler’s third law, we can estimate the mass of the object that keeps them in their orbits. One of the stars has been observed for its full orbit of 15.6 years. Its closest approach takes it to a distance of only 124 AU or about 17 light-hours from the black hole. This orbit, when combined with observations of other stars close to the galactic center, indicates that a mass of 4.6 million MSun must be concentrated inside the orbit—that is, within 17 light-hours of the center of the Galaxy.
Even tighter limits on the size of the concentration of mass at the center of the Galaxy come from radio astronomy, which provided the first clue that a black hole might lie at the center of the Galaxy. As matter spirals inward toward the event horizon of a black hole, it is heated in a whirling accretion disk and produces radio radiation. (Such accretion disks were explained in Black Holes and Curved Spacetime.) Measurements of the size of the accretion disk with the Very Long Baseline Array, which provides very high spatial resolution, show that the diameter of the radio source Sagittarius A* is no larger than about 0.3 AU, or about the size of Mercury’s orbit. (In light units, that’s only 2.5 light-minutes!)
The observations thus show that 4.6 million solar masses are crammed into a volume that has a diameter that is no larger than the orbit of Mercury. If this were anything other than a supermassive black hole—low-mass stars that emit very little light or neutron stars or a very large number of small black holes— calculations show that these objects would be so densely packed that they would collapse to a single black hole within a hundred thousand years. That is a very short time compared with the age of the Galaxy, which probably began forming more than 13 billion years ago. Since it seems very unlikely that we would have caught such a complex cluster of objects just before it collapsed, the evidence for a supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy is convincing indeed.

### Finding the Source

Where did our galactic black hole come from? The origin of supermassive black holes in galaxies like ours is currently an active field of research. One possibility is that a large cloud of gas near the center of the Milky Way collapsed directly to form a black hole. Since we find large black holes at the centers of most other large galaxies (see Active Galaxies, Quasars, and Supermassive Black Holes)—even ones that are very young—this collapse probably would have taken place when the Milky Way was just beginning to take shape. The initial mass of this black hole might have been only a few tens of solar masses. Another way it could have started is that a massive star might have exploded to leave behind a seed black hole, or a dense cluster of stars might have collapsed into a black hole.
Once a black hole exists at the center of a galaxy, it can grow over the next several billion years by devouring nearby stars and gas clouds in the crowded central regions. It can also grow by merging with other black holes.
It appears that the monster black hole at the center of our Galaxy is not finished “eating.” At the present time, we observe clouds of gas and dust falling into the galactic center at the rate of about 1 MSun per thousand years. Stars are also on the black hole’s menu. The density of stars near the galactic center is high enough that we would expect a star to pass near the black hole and be swallowed by it every ten thousand years or so. As this happens, some of the energy of infall is released as radiation. As a result, the center of the Galaxy might flare up and even briefly outshine all the stars in the Milky Way. Other objects might also venture too close to the black hole and be pulled in. How great a flare we observe would depend on the mass of the object falling in.
In 2013, the Chandra X-ray satellite detected a flare from the center of our Galaxy that was 400 times brighter than the usual output from Sagittarius A*. A year later, a second flare, only half as bright, was also detected. This is much less energy than swallowing a whole star would produce. There are two theories to account for the flares. First, an asteroid might have ventured too close to the black hole and been heated to a very high temperature before being swallowed up. Alternatively, the flares might have involved interactions of the magnetic fields near the galactic center in a process similar to the one described for solar flares (see The Sun: A Garden-Variety Star). Astronomers continue to monitor the galactic center area for flares or other activity. Although the monster in the center of the Galaxy is not close enough to us to represent any danger, we still want to keep our eyes on it.

### Key Concepts and Summary

A supermassive black hole is located at the center of the Galaxy. Measurements of the velocities of stars located within a few light-days of the center show that the mass inside their orbits around the center is about 4.6 million MSun. Radio observations show that this mass is concentrated in a volume with a diameter similar to that of Mercury’s orbit. The density of this matter concentration exceeds that of the densest known star clusters by a factor of nearly a million. The only known object with such a high density and total mass is a black hole.


# The Milky Way Galaxy

## Stellar Populations in the Galaxy

### Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Distinguish between population I and population II stars according to their locations, motions, heavy-element abundances, and ages
2. Explain why the oldest stars in the Galaxy are poor in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, while stars like the Sun and even younger stars are typically richer in these heavy elements
In the first section of his chapter, we described the thin disk, thick disk, and stellar halo. Look back at  and note some of the patterns. Young stars lie in the thin disk, are rich in metals, and orbit the Galaxy’s center at high speed. The stars in the halo are old, have low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, and have highly elliptical orbits randomly oriented in direction (see ). Halo stars can plunge through the disk and central bulge, but they spend most of their time far above or below the plane of the Galaxy. The stars in the thick disk are intermediate between these two extremes. Let’s first see why age and heavier-element abundance are correlated and then see what these correlations tell us about the origin of our Galaxy.

### Two Kinds of Stars

The discovery that there are two different kinds of stars was first made by Walter Baade during World War II. As a German national, Baade was not allowed to do war research as many other U.S.-based scientists were doing, so he was able to make regular use of the Mount Wilson telescopes in southern California. His observations were aided by the darker skies that resulted from the wartime blackout of Los Angeles.
Among the things a large telescope and dark skies enabled Baade to examine carefully were other galaxies—neighbors of our Milky Way Galaxy. We will discuss other galaxies in the next chapter (Galaxies), but for now we will just mention that the nearest Galaxy that resembles our own (with a similar disk and spiral structure) is often called the Andromeda galaxy, after the constellation in which we find it.
Baade was impressed by the similarity of the mainly reddish stars in the Andromeda galaxy’s nuclear bulge to those in our Galaxy’s globular clusters and the halo. He also noted the difference in color between all these and the bluer stars found in the spiral arms near the Sun (). On this basis, he called the bright blue stars in the spiral arms population I and all the stars in the halo and globular clusters population II.
We now know that the populations differ not only in their locations in the Galaxy, but also in their chemical composition, age, and orbital motions around the center of the Galaxy. Population I stars are found only in the disk and follow nearly circular orbits around the galactic center. Examples are bright supergiant stars, main-sequence stars of high luminosity (spectral classes O and B), which are concentrated in the spiral arms, and members of young open star clusters. Interstellar matter and molecular clouds are found in the same places as population I stars.
Population II stars show no correlation with the location of the spiral arms. These objects are found throughout the Galaxy. Some are in the disk, but many others follow eccentric elliptical orbits that carry them high above the galactic disk into the halo. Examples include stars surrounded by planetary nebulae and RR Lyrae variable stars. The stars in globular clusters, found almost entirely in the Galaxy’s halo, are also classified as population II.
Today, we know much more about stellar evolution than astronomers did in the 1940s, and we can determine the ages of stars. Population I includes stars with a wide range of ages. While some are as old as 10 billion years, others are still forming today. For example, the Sun, which is about 5 billion years old, is a population I star. But so are the massive young stars in the Orion Nebula that have formed in the last few million years. Population II, on the other hand, consists entirely of old stars that formed very early in the history of the Galaxy; typical ages are 11 to 13 billion years.
We also now have good determinations of the compositions of stars. These are based on analyses of the stars’ detailed spectra. Nearly all stars appear to be composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, but their abundances of the heavier elements differ. In the Sun and other population I stars, the heavy elements (those heavier than hydrogen and helium) account for 1–4% of the total stellar mass. Population II stars in the outer galactic halo and in globular clusters have much lower abundances of the heavy elements—often less than one-hundredth the concentrations found in the Sun and in rare cases even lower. The oldest population II star discovered to date has less than one ten-millionth as much iron as the Sun, for example.
As we discussed in earlier chapters, heavy elements are created deep within the interiors of stars. They are added to the Galaxy’s reserves of raw material when stars die, and their material is recycled into new generations of stars. Thus, as time goes on, stars are born with larger and larger supplies of heavy elements. Population II stars formed when the abundance of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium was low. Population I stars formed later, after mass lost by dying members of the first generations of stars had seeded the interstellar medium with elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Some are still forming now, when further generations have added to the supply of heavier elements available to new stars.

### The Real World

With rare exceptions, we should never trust any theory that divides the world into just two categories. While they can provide a starting point for hypotheses and experiments, they are often oversimplifications that need refinement a research continue. The idea of two populations helped organize our initial thoughts about the Galaxy, but we now know it cannot explain everything we observe. Even the different structures of the Galaxy—disk, halo, central bulge—are not so cleanly separated in terms of their locations, ages, and the heavy element content of the stars within them.
The exact definition of the Galaxy’s disk depends on what objects we use to define it, and, as we saw earlier, it has no sharp boundary. The hottest young stars and their associated gas and dust clouds are mostly in a region about 200 light-years thick. Older stars define a thicker disk that is about 2000 light-years thick. Halo stars spend most of their time high above or below the disk but pass through it on their highly elliptical orbits and so are sometimes found relatively near the Sun.
The highest density of stars is found in the central bulge, that bar-shaped inner region of the Galaxy. There are a few hot, young stars in the bulge, but most of the bulge stars are more than 10 billion years old. Yet unlike the halo stars of similar age, the abundance of heavy elements in the bulge stars is about the same as in the Sun. Why would that be?
Astronomers think that star formation in the crowded nuclear bulge occurred very rapidly just after the Milky Way Galaxy formed. After a few million years, the first generation of massive and short-lived stars then expelled heavy elements in supernova explosions and thereby enriched subsequent generations of stars. Thus, even stars that formed in the bulge more than 10 billion years ago started with a good supply of heavy elements.
Exactly the opposite occurred in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy near the Milky Way, visible from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere. Even the youngest stars in this galaxy are deficient in heavy elements. We think this is because the little galaxy is not especially crowded, and star formation has occurred quite slowly. As a result there have been, so far, relatively few supernova explosions. Smaller galaxies also have more trouble holding onto the gas expelled by supernova explosions in order to recycle it. Low-mass galaxies exert only a modest gravitational force, and the high-speed gas ejected by supernovae can easily escape from them.
Which elements a star is endowed with thus depends not only on when the star formed in the history of its galaxy, but also on how many stars in its part of the galaxy had already completed their lives by the time the star is ready to form.

### Key Concepts and Summary

We can roughly divide the stars in the Galaxy into two categories. Old stars with few heavy elements are referred to as population II stars and are found in the halo and in globular clusters. Population I stars contain more heavy elements than globular cluster and halo stars, are typically younger and found in the disk, and are especially concentrated in the spiral arms. The Sun is a member of population I. Population I stars formed after previous generations of stars had produced heavy elements and ejected them into the interstellar medium. The bulge stars, most of which are more than 10 billion years old, have unusually high amounts of heavy elements, presumably because there were many massive first-generation stars in this dense region, and these quickly seeded the next generations of stars with heavier elements.


# The Milky Way Galaxy

## The Formation of the Galaxy

### Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe the roles played by the collapse of a single cloud and mergers with other galaxies in building the Milky Way Galaxy we see today
2. Provide examples of globular clusters and satellite galaxies affected by the Milky Way’s strong gravity.
Information about stellar populations holds vital clues to how our Galaxy was built up over time. The flattened disk shape of the Galaxy suggests that it formed through a process similar to the one that leads to the formation of a protostar (see The Birth of Stars and the Discovery of Planets outside the Solar System). Building on this idea, astronomers first developed models that assumed the Galaxy formed from a single rotating cloud. But, as we shall see, this turns out to be only part of the story.

### The Protogalactic Cloud and the Monolithic Collapse Model

Because the oldest stars—those in the halo and in globular clusters—are distributed in a sphere centered on the nucleus of the Galaxy, it makes sense to assume that the protogalactic cloud that gave birth to our Galaxy was roughly spherical. The oldest stars in the halo have ages of 12 to 13 billion years, so we estimate that the formation of the Galaxy began about that long ago. (See the chapter on The Big Bang for other evidence that galaxies in general began forming a little more than 13 billion years ago.) Then, just as in the case of star formation, the protogalactic cloud collapsed and formed a thin rotating disk. Stars born before the cloud collapsed did not participate in the collapse, but have continued to orbit in the halo to the present day ().
Gravitational forces caused the gas in the thin disk to fragment into clouds or clumps with masses like those of star clusters. These individual clouds then fragmented further to form stars. Since the oldest stars in the disk are nearly as old as the youngest stars in the halo, the collapse must have been rapid (astronomically speaking), requiring perhaps no more than a few hundred million years.

### Collision Victims and the Multiple Merger Model

In past decades, astronomers have learned that the evolution of the Galaxy has not been quite as peaceful as this monolithic collapse model suggests. In 1994, astronomers discovered a small new galaxy in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy is currently about 70,000 light-years away from Earth and 50,000 light-years from the center of the Galaxy. It is the closest galaxy known (). It is very elongated, and its shape indicates that it is being torn apart by our Galaxy’s gravitational tides—just as Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was torn apart when it passed too close to Jupiter in 1992.
The Sagittarius galaxy is much smaller than the Milky Way and is about 10,000 times less massive than our Galaxy. All of the stars in the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy seem destined to end up in the bulge and halo of the Milky Way. But don’t sound the funeral bells for the little galaxy quite yet; the ingestion of the Sagittarius dwarf will take another 100 million years or so, and the stars themselves will survive.
Since that discovery, evidence has been found for many more close encounters between our Galaxy and other neighbor galaxies. When a small galaxy ventures too close, the force of gravity exerted by our Galaxy tugs harder on the near side than on the far side. The net effect is that the stars that originally belonged to the small galaxy are spread out into a long stream that orbits through the halo of the Milky Way ().
Such a tidal stream can maintain its identity for billions of years. To date, astronomers have now identified streams originating from 12 small galaxies that ventured too close to the much larger Milky Way. Six more streams are associated with globular clusters. It has been suggested that large globular clusters, like Omega Centauri, are actually dense nuclei of cannibalized dwarf galaxies. The globular cluster M54 is now thought to be the nucleus of the Sagittarius dwarf we discussed earlier, which is currently merging with the Milky Way (). The stars in the outer regions of such galaxies are stripped off by the gravitational pull of the Milky Way, but the central dense regions may survive.
Calculations indicate that the Galaxy’s thick disk may be a product of one or more such collisions with other galaxies. Accretion of a satellite galaxy would stir up the orbits of the stars and gas clouds originally in the thin disk and cause them to move higher above and below the mid-plane of the Galaxy. Meanwhile, the Galaxy’s stars would add to the fluffed-up mix. If such a collision happened about 10 billion years ago, then any gas in the two galaxies that had not yet formed into stars would have had plenty of time to settle back down into the thin disk. The gas could then have begun forming subsequent generations of population I stars. This timing is also consistent with the typical ages of stars in the thick disk.
The Milky Way has more collisions in store. An example is the Canis Major dwarf galaxy, which has a mass of about 1% of the mass of the Milky Way. Already long tidal tails have been stripped from this galaxy, which have wrapped themselves around the Milky Way three times. Several of the globular clusters found in the Milky Way may also have come from the Canis Major dwarf, which is expected to merge gradually with the Milky Way over about the next billion years.
In about 4 billion years, the Milky Way itself will be swallowed up, since it and the Andromeda galaxy are on a collision course. Our computer models show that after a complex interaction, the two will merge to form a larger, more rounded galaxy ().
We are thus coming to realize that “environmental influences” (and not just a galaxy’s original characteristics) play an important role in determining the properties and development of our Galaxy. In future chapters we will see that collisions and mergers are a major factor in the evolution of many other galaxies as well.

### Key Concepts and Summary

The Galaxy began forming a little more than 13 billion years ago. Models suggest that the stars in the halo and globular clusters formed first, while the Galaxy was spherical. The gas, somewhat enriched in heavy elements by the first generation of stars, then collapsed from a spherical distribution to a rotating disk-shaped distribution. Stars are still forming today from the gas and dust that remain in the disk. Star formation occurs most rapidly in the spiral arms, where the density of interstellar matter is highest. The Galaxy captured (and still is capturing) additional stars and globular clusters from small galaxies that ventured too close to the Milky Way. In 3 to 4 billion years, the Galaxy will begin to collide with the Andromeda galaxy, and after about 7 billion years, the two galaxies will merge to form a giant elliptical galaxy.

### For Further Exploration

### Articles

Blitz, L. “The Dark Side of the Milky Way.” Scientific American (October 2011): 36–43. How we find dark matter and what it tells us about our Galaxy, its warped disk, and its satellite galaxies.
Dvorak, J. “Journey to the Heart of the Milky Way.” Astronomy (February 2008): 28. Measuring nearby stars to determine the properties of the black hole at the center.
Gallagher, J., Wyse, R., & Benjamin, R. “The New Milky Way.” Astronomy (September 2011): 26. Highlights all aspects of the Milky Way based on recent observations.
Goldstein, A. “Finding our Place in the Milky Way.” Astronomy (August 2015): 50. On the history of observations that pinpointed the Sun’s location in the Galaxy.
Haggard, D., & Bower, G. “In the Heart of the Milky Way.” Sky & Telescope (February 2016): 16. On observations of the Galaxy’s nucleus and the supermassive black hole and magnetar there.
Ibata, R., & Gibson, B. “The Ghosts of Galaxies Past.” Scientific American (April 2007): 40. About star streams in the Galaxy that are evidence of past mergers and collisions.
Irion, R. “A Crushing End for Our Galaxy.” Science (January 7, 2000): 62. On the role of mergers in the evolution of the Milky Way.
Irion, R. “Homing in on Black Holes.” Smithsonian (April 2008). On how astronomers probe the large black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
Kruesi, L. “How We Mapped the Milky Way.” Astronomy (October 2009): 28.
Kruesi, L. “What Lurks in the Monstrous Heart of the Milky Way?” Astronomy (October 2015): 30. On the center of the Galaxy and the black hole there.
Laughlin, G., & Adams, F. “Celebrating the Galactic Millennium.” Astronomy (November 2001): 39. The long-term future of the Milky Way in the next 90 billion years.
Loeb, A., & Cox, T.J. “Our Galaxy’s Date with Destruction.” Astronomy (June 2008): 28. Describes the upcoming merger of Milky Way and Andromeda.
Szpir, M. “Passing the Bar Exam.” Astronomy (March 1999): 46. On evidence that our Galaxy is a barred spiral.
Tanner, A. “A Trip to the Galactic Center.” Sky & Telescope (April 2003): 44. Nice introduction, with observations pointing to the presence of a black hole.
Trimble, V., & Parker, S. “Meet the Milky Way.” Sky & Telescope (January 1995): 26. Overview of our Galaxy.
Wakker, B., & Richter, P. “Our Growing, Breathing Galaxy.” Scientific American (January 2004): 38. Evidence that our Galaxy is still being built up by the addition of gas and smaller neighbors.
Waller, W. “Redesigning the Milky Way.” Sky & Telescope (September 2004): 50. On recent multi-wavelength surveys of the Galaxy.
Whitt, K. “The Milky Way from the Inside.” Astronomy (November 2001): 58. Fantastic panorama image of the Galaxy, with finder charts and explanations.

### Websites

International Dark Sky Sanctuaries: http://darksky.org/idsp/sanctuaries/. A listing of dark-sky sanctuaries, parks, and reserves.
Multiwavelength Milky Way: https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/mwmw/mmw_edu.html. This NASA site shows the plane of our Galaxy in a variety of wavelength bands, and includes background material and other resources.
Shapley-Curtis Debate in 1920: https://apod.nasa.gov/debate/debate20.html. In 1920, astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis engaged in a historic debate about how large our Galaxy was and whether other galaxies existed. Here you can find historical and educational material about the debate.
UCLA Galactic Center Group: http://www.galacticcenter.astro.ucla.edu/. Learn more about the work of Andrea Ghez and colleagues on the central region of the Milky Way Galaxy.

### Videos

Crash of the Titans: http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/hubblecast55a/. This Hubblecast from 2012 features Jay Anderson and Roeland van der Marel explaining how Andromeda will collide with the Milky Way in the distant future (5:07).
Diner at the Center of the Galaxy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP7ig8Gxftw. A short discussion from NASA ScienceCast of NuSTAR observations of flares from our Galaxy’s central black hole (3:23).
Hunt for a Supermassive Black Hole: https://www.ted.com/talks/andrea_ghez_the_hunt_for_a_supermassive_black_hole. 2009 TED talk by Andrea Ghez on searching for supermassive black holes, particularly the one at the center of the Milky Way (16:19).
Journey to the Galactic Center: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36xZsgZ0oSo. A brief silent trip into the cluster of stars near the galactic center showing their motions around the center (3:00).
The Nobel Prize Lecture by Dr. Andrea Ghez in 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGw6_CdvGKM.

### Collaborative Group Activities

1. You are captured by space aliens, who take you inside a complex cloud of interstellar gas, dust, and a few newly formed stars. To escape, you need to make a map of the cloud. Luckily, the aliens have a complete astronomical observatory with equipment for measuring all the bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Using what you have learned in this chapter, have your group discuss what kinds of maps you would make of the cloud to plot your most effective escape route.
2. The diagram that Herschel made of the Milky Way has a very irregular outer boundary (see ). Can your group think of a reason for this? How did Herschel construct his map?
3. Suppose that for your final exam in this course, your group is assigned telescope time to observe a star selected for you by your professor. The professor tells you the position of the star in the sky (its right ascension and declination) but nothing else. You can make any observations you wish. How would you go about determining whether the star is a member of population I or population II?
4. The existence of dark matter comes as a great surprise, and its nature remains a mystery today. Someday astronomers will know a lot more about it (you can learn more about current findings in The Evolution and Distribution of Galaxies). Can your group make a list of earlier astronomical observations that began as a surprise and mystery, but wound up (with more observations) as well-understood parts of introductory textbooks?
5. Physicist Gregory Benford has written a series of science fiction novels that take place near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy in the far future. Suppose your group were writing such a story. Make a list of ways that the environment near the galactic center differs from the environment in the “galactic suburbs,” where the Sun is located. Would life as we know it have an easier or harder time surviving on planets that orbit stars near the center (and why)?
6. These days, in most urban areas, city lights completely swamp the faint light of the Milky Way in our skies. Have each member of your group survey 5 to 10 friends or relatives (you could spread out on campus to investigate or use social media or the phone), explaining what the Milky Way is and then asking if they have seen it. Also ask their age. Report back to your group and discuss your reactions to the survey. Is there any relationship between a person’s age and whether they have seen the Milky Way? How important is it that many kids growing up on Earth today never (or rarely) get to see our home Galaxy in the sky?

### Review Questions

### Thought Questions

### Figuring for Yourself


# Galaxies

## Thinking Ahead

In the last chapter, we explored our own Galaxy. But is it the only one? If there are others, are they like the Milky Way? How far away are they? Can we see them? As we shall learn, some galaxies turn out to be so far away that it has taken billions of years for their light to reach us. These remote galaxies can tell us what the universe was like when it was young.
In this chapter, we start our exploration of the vast realm of galaxies. Like tourists from a small town making their first visit to the great cities of the world, we will be awed by the beauty and variety of the galaxies. And yet, we will recognize that much of what we see is not so different from our experiences at home, and we will be impressed by how much we can learn by looking at structures built long ago.
We begin our voyage with a guide to the properties of galaxies, much as a tourist begins with a guidebook to the main features of the cities on the itinerary. In later chapters, we will look more carefully at the past history of galaxies, how they have changed over time, and how they acquired their many different forms. First, we’ll begin our voyage through the galaxies with the question: is our Galaxy the only one?


# Galaxies

## The Discovery of Galaxies

### Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:
1. Describe the discoveries that confirmed the existence of galaxies that lie far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy
2. Explain why galaxies used to be called nebulae and why we don’t include them in that category any more
Growing up at a time when the Hubble Space Telescope orbits above our heads and giant telescopes are springing up on the great mountaintops of the world, you may be surprised to learn that we were not sure about the existence of other galaxies for a very long time. The very idea that other galaxies exist used to be controversial. Even into the 1920s, many astronomers thought the Milky Way encompassed all that exists in the universe. The evidence found in 1924 that meant our Galaxy is not alone was one of the great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century.
It was not that scientists weren’t asking questions. They questioned the composition and structure of the universe as early as the eighteenth century. However, with the telescopes available in earlier centuries, galaxies looked like small fuzzy patches of light that were difficult to distinguish from the star clusters and gas-and-dust clouds that are part of our own Galaxy. All objects that were not sharp points of light were given the same name, nebulae, the Latin word for “clouds.” Because their precise shapes were often hard to make out and no techniques had yet been devised for measuring their distances, the nature of the nebulae was the subject of much debate.
As early as the eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) suggested that some of the nebulae might be distant systems of stars (other Milky Ways), but the evidence to support this suggestion was beyond the capabilities of the telescopes of that time.

### Other Galaxies

By the early twentieth century, some nebulae had been correctly identified as star clusters, and others (such as the Orion Nebula) as gaseous nebulae. Most nebulae, however, looked faint and indistinct, even with the best telescopes, and their distances remained unknown. (For more on how such nebulae are named, by the way, see the feature box on Naming the Nebulae in the chapter on interstellar matter.) If these nebulae were nearby, with distances comparable to those of observable stars, they were most likely clouds of gas or groups of stars within our Galaxy. If, on the other hand, they were remote, far beyond the edge of the Galaxy, they could be other star systems containing billions of stars.
To determine what the nebulae are, astronomers had to find a way of measuring the distances to at least some of them. When the 2.5-meter (100-inch) telescope on Mount Wilson in Southern California went into operation, astronomers finally had the large telescope they needed to settle the controversy.
Working with the 2.5-meter telescope, Edwin Hubble was able to resolve individual stars in several of the brighter spiral-shaped nebulae, including M31, the great spiral in Andromeda (). Among these stars, he discovered some faint variable stars that—when he analyzed their light curves—turned out to be cepheids. Here were reliable indicators that Hubble could use to measure the distances to the nebulae using the technique pioneered by Henrietta Leavitt (see the chapter on Celestial Distances). After painstaking work, he estimated that the Andromeda galaxy was about 900,000 light-years away from us. At that enormous distance, it had to be a separate galaxy of stars located well outside the boundaries of the Milky Way. Today, we know the Andromeda galaxy is actually slightly more than twice as distant as Hubble’s first estimate, but his conclusion about its true nature remains unchanged.
No one in human history had ever measured a distance so great. When Hubble’s paper on the distances to nebulae was read before a meeting of the American Astronomical Society on the first day of 1925, the entire room erupted in a standing ovation. A new era had begun in the study of the universe, and a new scientific field—extragalactic astronomy—had just been born.

### Key Concepts and Summary

Faint star clusters, clouds of glowing gas, and galaxies all appeared as faint patches of light (or nebulae) in the telescopes available at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was only when Hubble measured the distance to the Andromeda galaxy using cepheid variables with the giant 2.5-meter reflector on Mount Wilson in 1924 that the existence of other galaxies similar to the Milky Way in size and content was established.