Study of the Milky Way Galaxy

Stars are not distributed randomly throughout space. Many stars are in systems consisting of two or three members separated by less than 1,000 AU. On a larger scale, star clusters may contain many thousands of stars. Galaxies are much larger systems of stars and usually include clouds of gas and dust.

The solar system is located within the Milky Way Galaxy, close to its equatorial plane and about 8 kiloparsecs from the galactic centre. The galactic diameter is about 30 kiloparsecs, as indicated by luminous matter. There is evidence, however, for nonluminous matter—so-called dark matter—extending out nearly twice this distance. The entire system is rotating such that, at the position of the Sun, the orbital speed is about 220 km per second (almost 500,000 miles per hour) and a complete circuit takes roughly 240 million years. Application of Kepler’s third law leads to an estimate for the galactic mass of about 100 billion solar masses. The rotational velocity can be measured from the Doppler shifts observed in the 21-cm emission line of neutral hydrogen and the lines of millimetre wavelengths from various molecules, especially carbon monoxide. At great distances from the galactic centre, the rotational velocity does not drop off as expected but rather increases slightly. This behaviour appears to require a much larger galactic mass than can be accounted for by the known (luminous) matter. Additional evidence for the presence of dark matter comes from a variety of other observations. The nature and extent of the dark matter (or missing mass) constitutes one of today’s major astronomical puzzles.

There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Star concentrations within the galaxy fall into three types: open clusters, globular clusters, and associations (see star cluster). Open clusters lie primarily in the disk of the galaxy; most contain between 50 and 1,000 stars within a region no more than 10 parsecs in diameter. Stellar associations tend to have somewhat fewer stars; moreover, the constituent stars are not as closely grouped as those in the clusters and are for the most part hotter. Globular clusters, which are widely scattered around the galaxy, may extend up to about 100 parsecs in diameter and may have as many as a million stars. The importance to astronomers of globular clusters lies in their use as indicators of the age of the galaxy. Because massive stars evolve more rapidly than do smaller stars, the age of a cluster can be estimated from its H-R diagram. In a young cluster the main sequence will be well populated, but in an old cluster the heavier stars will have evolved away from the main sequence. The extent of the depopulation of the main sequence provides an index of age. In this way, the oldest globular clusters have been found to be about 12.5 billion years old, which should therefore be the minimum age for the galaxy.