07.01.2013 Views

Digital Universe Guide - Hayden Planetarium

Digital Universe Guide - Hayden Planetarium

Digital Universe Guide - Hayden Planetarium

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

3.3. MILKY WAY DATA GROUPS 127<br />

3.3.30 Galaxy Image<br />

Group Name galaxy<br />

Reference European Space Agency<br />

Prepared by Carter Emmart (AMNH/<strong>Hayden</strong>)<br />

Labels No<br />

Files mwpoly.speck<br />

Dependencies ngc1232.sgi<br />

A problem that continues to baffle astronomers today is defining the structure of our star system, the<br />

Milky Way. Because we reside within our Galaxy, we cannot see the larger picture of what the Galaxy<br />

actually looks like. Even today, astronomers continue to debate the structure of the Milky Way with more<br />

uncertainty than that of other galaxies that are millions of light-years away.<br />

In 1918 and 1919, a series of papers by Harlow Shapley were published that described the<br />

dimensions of our Galaxy. Using the distribution of globular clusters in the sky, Shapley deduced that<br />

the center of our star system was in the direction of Sagittarius and that the distance to those clusters<br />

was greater than anyone had ever proposed.<br />

A great debate had taken the astronomical world by storm. Was the Andromeda Nebula inside our<br />

own Galaxy, or was it a distant extragalactic object similar to our Galaxy? Within five years, Edwin<br />

Hubble solved the debate by observing Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Nebula, which allowed<br />

him to measure the distance to the star system, now called a galaxy with confidence.<br />

This debate and its outcome gave astronomers a better idea of how the Galaxy was structured. With<br />

other galaxies as examples, it soon became clear that we were inside a spiral galaxy like Andromeda.<br />

The Galaxy in 2-D The exterior view of the Milky Way is simply a two-dimensional image. The<br />

image is that of NGC 1232, a galaxy thought to resemble our Milky Way. The image has been properly<br />

sized and functions as a placeholder, allowing one to gauge the scale of the Galactic disk relative to<br />

other data sets in the Atlas.<br />

You can adjust the brightness of the Galaxy using the Alpha Slider. Its size is specified in the speck<br />

file but is also affected by commands in the mw.cf file.<br />

The features you see in the image, of course, do not represent our Galaxy but resemble similar<br />

features found in our Galaxy. The Sun is just on the inside of the smaller Orion Arm, sometimes called<br />

the Orion Spur, as it might connect the Sagittarius and Perseus arms. The features seen in this image

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!