Galaxies

Galaxy, a massive ensemble of hundreds of millions of stars, all gravitationally interacting, and orbiting about a common center. Astronomers estimate that there are about 125 billion galaxies in the universe. All the stars visible to the unaided eye from Earth belong to Earth’s galaxy, the Milky Way. The Sun, with its associated planets, is just one star in this galaxy. Besides stars and planets, galaxies contain clusters of stars; atomic hydrogen gas; molecular hydrogen; complex molecules composed of hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and silicon, among others; and cosmic rays.

Origins of Galaxies:

As the 21st century began, astronomers believed they were much closer to understanding the origins of galaxies. Observations made by the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which was launched in 1989, confirmed predictions made by the big bang theory of the universe’s origin. COBE also detected small irregularities, or ripples, in the background radiation that uniformly pervades the universe. These ripples were thought to be clumps of matter that

formed soon after the big bang. The clumps became the seeds from which galaxies and clusters of galaxies developed. The ripples were studied in more detail in limited regions of the sky by a variety of ground-based and balloon-based experiments. A more recent spacecraft, NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), made even more accurate observations of these ripples across the entire sky. In 2003 WMAP’s results confirmed the existence of these galactic seeds, providing a full-sky map of the universe’s emerging galaxies. Read more

Classification of Galaxies

When viewed or photographed with a large telescope, only the nearest galaxies exhibit individual stars. For most galaxies, only the combined light of all the stars is detected. Galaxies exhibit a variety of forms. Some have an overall globular shape, with a bright nucleus. Such galaxies, called ellipticals, contain a population of old stars, usually with little apparent gas or dust, and few newly formed stars.

Elliptical galaxies come in a vast range of sizes, from giant to dwarf.In contrast, spiral galaxies are flattened disk systems containing not only some old stars but also large populations of young stars, much gas and dust, and molecular clouds that are the birthplace of stars . Often the regions containing bright young stars and gas clouds are arranged in long spiral arms that can be observed to wind around the galaxy.

Generally a halo of faint older stars surrounds the disk; a smaller nuclear bulge often exists, emitting two jets of energetic matter in opposite directions.Other disklike galaxies, with no overall spiral form, are classified as irregulars. These galaxies also have large amounts of gas, dust, and young stars, but no arrangement of a spiral form. They are usually located near larger galaxies, and their appearance is probably the result of a tidal encounter with the more massive galaxy.

Some extremely peculiar galaxies are located in close groups of two or three, and their tidal interactions have caused distortions of spiral arms, producing warped disks and long streamer tails. Ring galaxies, for example, form when a small galaxy collides with the center of a spiral galaxy. An intense ring of stars forms at the outer edges of the new, combined galaxy. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has revealed many more ring galaxies than astronomers expected, suggesting that galactic collisions may be common.Quasars are objects that appear stellar or almost stellar, but their enormous redshifts identify them as objects at very large distances (see Quasar; Radio Astronomy). They are probably closely related to radio galaxies and to BL Lacertae objects. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) completed a survey of nearby galaxies in 1996 that revealed that all large galaxies may be homes to quasars early in the galaxy’s life. The HST survey showed that most of the galaxies contain massive black holes, which may be the next stage in galactic evolution.

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