After Long Debate, The Size and Shape of Our Own Galaxy Were Determined

(2) After long debate, the size and shape of our own galaxy were determined.
Ancient Greek astronomers called the Milky Way, the faint band of light visible in the night sky,
``galaxias kuklos'' (in English, the ``milky circle''). This name is the origin of the term ``galaxy''.
The ancient Greeks thought that the Milky Way was made of a luminous fluid embedded in the
celestial sphere.
In the early 17th century, Galileo turned his telescope on the Milky Way, and discovered that it
was not a continuous fluid, but consisted of innumerable faint stars, each too dim to be seen
individually.
Galileo's discovery led to the hypothesis that the Sun is embedded within a thick disk of stars.
The Milky Way occurs where we look in the direction parallel to the faces of the disk; in this
direction we see more stars, and their light adds together to make the continuous band of light
that we call the Milky Way.
William Herschel (discoverer of Uranus) and his sister Caroline (discoverer of many comets)
made the first attempt to accurately determine the shape of our galaxy. They counted the number
of stars along 683 lines of sight leading away from the Sun. If they saw few stars, they concluded
that the edge of the galaxy was very near in that direction. If they saw many stars along a line of
sight, they concluded that the edge of the galaxy was far away in that direction. Their conclusion:
the galaxy is shaped like an irregular grindstone (or thick disk). A cross-section of the galaxy, as
plotted by the Herschels is shown below (click on the image for a larger version). The Sun is
slightly off-center to the left.
In the early 20th century, a Dutch astronomer named Jacobus Kapteyn refined the Herschels'
technique. He concluded that the galaxy was a disk about 3 kiloparsecs thick and 17 kiloparsecs
in diameter (about the shape of an Oreo cookie). He also believed that the Sun was near the
center of the galaxy.
Both the Herschels and Kapteyn were WRONG!! The Sun is nowhere near the center of the
galaxy, and the galaxy is significantly larger than Kapteyn thought. Kapteyn thought that
because he couldn't see any stars farther than 8 kpc away, that there were no stars farther than 8
kpc away. In fact, the scattering of light by interstellar dust keeps us from seeing more than 8
kiloparsecs away in the disk of our galaxy.
The (approximately) correct size and shape of our galaxy were determined by Harlow Shapley in
1920. Shapley noted that the globular clusters that swarm around our galaxy all tend to lie on one
side of the sky, centered on the constellation Sagittarius. If the Sun were at the center of the
galaxy, we would see roughly the same number of globular clusters in all directions. Therefore,
Shapley concluded that the Sun is NOT at the center of the galaxy; the center lies in the direction
of Sagittarius, around which the globular clusters are distributed.
Shapley was also able to measure the distances to globular clusters. Globular clusters are too far
away to measure their distances by parallax. However, globular clusters contain RR Lyrae
variable stars. Every RR Lyrae star (as described in the lecture for Wednesday, January 29) has a
luminosity of about L = 80 Lsun Measure the average apparent brightness b of an RR Lyrae star
in a globular cluster, and you can find the distance d to that globular cluster from the relation
L = 4 pi d2 b .
Shapley's plot of the distribution of globular clusters is shown below. The yellow blotch where
the axes cross is the position of the Sun. The red X off to the right is the center of the galaxy, as
defined by the globular clusters.
Shapley concluded that the center of the galaxy is 17 kiloparsecs away. However, Shapley
neglected to take into account the dimming of globular clusters by intervening dust.
The actual distance from the Sun to the center of the galaxy is 8 kiloparsecs = 8000 parsecs
= 26,000 light years.
Copernicus deflated human egos by pointing out that the Earth is not the center of the Solar
System. Shapley deflated our egos still more by pointing out that the Solar System is not the
center of the galaxy. We are out in the suburbs, 3/4 of the way from the center to the edge of the
galaxy's disk.

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(2) After long debate, the size and shape of our own galaxy were determined.

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