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70-512: José Luis Sérsic (6 May 1933 – 19 July 1993) was an Argentine astronomer who studied the morphology of galaxies . He is most widely known for the mathematical model of galaxy brightness, the Sersic profile , which bears his name. José Luis Sérsic first published his law in 1963. The asteroid 2691 Sersic is named in his honour. This article about an astronomer is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Galaxy A galaxy

140-452: A chain reaction of star-building that spreads throughout the gaseous region. Only when the available gas is nearly consumed or dispersed does the activity end. Starbursts are often associated with merging or interacting galaxies. The prototype example of such a starburst-forming interaction is M82 , which experienced a close encounter with the larger M81 . Irregular galaxies often exhibit spaced knots of starburst activity. A radio galaxy

210-684: A debate took place between Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis , the Great Debate , concerning the nature of the Milky Way, spiral nebulae, and the dimensions of the universe. To support his claim that the Great Andromeda Nebula is an external galaxy, Curtis noted the appearance of dark lanes resembling the dust clouds in the Milky Way, as well as the significant Doppler shift. In 1922, the Estonian astronomer Ernst Öpik gave

280-536: A distance determination that supported the theory that the Andromeda Nebula is indeed a distant extra-galactic object. Using the new 100-inch Mt. Wilson telescope, Edwin Hubble was able to resolve the outer parts of some spiral nebulae as collections of individual stars and identified some Cepheid variables , thus allowing him to estimate the distance to the nebulae: they were far too distant to be part of

350-418: A function of their radius (or distance from their cores) falls off more slowly than their smaller counterparts. The formation of these cD galaxies remains an active area of research, but the leading model is that they are the result of the mergers of smaller galaxies in the environments of dense clusters, or even those outside of clusters with random overdensities. These processes are the mechanisms that drive

420-462: A huge number of stars held together by gravitational forces, akin to the Solar System but on a much larger scale, and that the resulting disk of stars could be seen as a band on the sky from a perspective inside it. In his 1755 treatise, Immanuel Kant elaborated on Wright's idea about the Milky Way's structure. The first project to describe the shape of the Milky Way and the position of

490-429: A low portion of open clusters and a reduced rate of new star formation. Instead, they are dominated by generally older, more evolved stars that are orbiting the common center of gravity in random directions. The stars contain low abundances of heavy elements because star formation ceases after the initial burst. In this sense they have some similarity to the much smaller globular clusters . The largest galaxies are

560-403: A mortal woman, the infant Heracles , on Hera 's breast while she is asleep so the baby will drink her divine milk and thus become immortal. Hera wakes up while breastfeeding and then realises she is nursing an unknown baby: she pushes the baby away, some of her milk spills, and it produces the band of light known as the Milky Way. In the astronomical literature, the capitalised word "Galaxy"

630-560: A part of the Milky Way, but their true composition and natures remained a mystery. Observations using larger telescopes of a few nearby bright galaxies, like the Andromeda Galaxy , began resolving them into huge conglomerations of stars, but based simply on the apparent faintness and sheer population of stars, the true distances of these objects placed them well beyond the Milky Way. For this reason they were popularly called island universes , but this term quickly fell into disuse, as

700-417: A pattern that can be theoretically shown to result from a disturbance in a uniformly rotating mass of stars. Like the stars, the spiral arms rotate around the center, but they do so with constant angular velocity . The spiral arms are thought to be areas of high-density matter, or " density waves ". As stars move through an arm, the space velocity of each stellar system is modified by the gravitational force of

770-400: A plane, the majority of mass in spiral galaxies exists in a roughly spherical halo of dark matter which extends beyond the visible component, as demonstrated by the universal rotation curve concept. Spiral galaxies consist of a rotating disk of stars and interstellar medium, along with a central bulge of generally older stars. Extending outward from the bulge are relatively bright arms. In

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840-438: A reserve of cold gas that forms giant molecular clouds . Some galaxies have been observed to form stars at an exceptional rate, which is known as a starburst . If they continue to do so, they would consume their reserve of gas in a time span less than the galaxy's lifespan. Hence starburst activity usually lasts only about ten million years, a relatively brief period in a galaxy's history. Starburst galaxies were more common during

910-435: A rotating bar structure in the center of this galaxy. With improved radio telescopes , hydrogen gas could also be traced in other galaxies. In the 1970s, Vera Rubin uncovered a discrepancy between observed galactic rotation speed and that predicted by the visible mass of stars and gas. Today, the galaxy rotation problem is thought to be explained by the presence of large quantities of unseen dark matter . Beginning in

980-488: A single larger galaxy; the Milky Way has at least a dozen such satellites, with an estimated 300–500 yet to be discovered. Most of the information we have about dwarf galaxies come from observations of the local group , containing two spiral galaxies, the Milky Way and Andromeda, and many dwarf galaxies. These dwarf galaxies are classified as either irregular or dwarf elliptical / dwarf spheroidal galaxies . A study of 27 Milky Way neighbors found that in all dwarf galaxies,

1050-419: A smaller companion galaxy—that as the two galaxy centers approach, they start to oscillate around a center point, and the oscillation creates gravitational ripples forming the shells of stars, similar to ripples spreading on water. For example, galaxy NGC 3923 has over 20 shells. Spiral galaxies resemble spiraling pinwheels . Though the stars and other visible material contained in such a galaxy lie mostly on

1120-528: Is 3C 236 , with lobes 15 million light-years across. It should however be noted that radio emissions are not always considered part of the main galaxy itself. A giant radio galaxy is a special class of objects characterized by the presence of radio lobes generated by relativistic jets powered by the central galaxy's supermassive black hole . Giant radio galaxies are different from ordinary radio galaxies in that they can extend to much larger scales, reaching upwards to several megaparsecs across, far larger than

1190-516: Is a galaxy with giant regions of radio emission extending well beyond its visible structure. These energetic radio lobes are powered by jets from its active galactic nucleus . Radio galaxies are classified according to their Fanaroff–Riley classification . The FR I class have lower radio luminosity and exhibit structures which are more elongated; the FR II class are higher radio luminosity. The correlation of radio luminosity and structure suggests that

1260-495: Is a spiral galaxy having the number 109 in the catalogue of Messier. It also has the designations NGC 3992, UGC 6937, CGCG 269–023, MCG +09-20-044, and PGC 37617 (or LEDA 37617), among others. Millions of fainter galaxies are known by their identifiers in sky surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey . Greek philosopher Democritus (450–370 BCE) proposed that the bright band on the night sky known as

1330-637: Is a system of stars , stellar remnants , interstellar gas , dust , and dark matter bound together by gravity . The word is derived from the Greek galaxias ( γαλαξίας ), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System . Galaxies, averaging an estimated 100 million stars, range in size from dwarfs with less than a thousand stars, to the largest galaxies known – supergiants with one hundred trillion stars, each orbiting its galaxy's center of mass . Most of

1400-562: Is also used to observe distant, red-shifted galaxies that were formed much earlier. Water vapor and carbon dioxide absorb a number of useful portions of the infrared spectrum, so high-altitude or space-based telescopes are used for infrared astronomy . The first non-visual study of galaxies, particularly active galaxies, was made using radio frequencies . The Earth's atmosphere is nearly transparent to radio between 5  MHz and 30 GHz. The ionosphere blocks signals below this range. Large radio interferometers have been used to map

1470-531: Is called the Galactic Center . The Hubble classification system rates elliptical galaxies on the basis of their ellipticity, ranging from E0, being nearly spherical, up to E7, which is highly elongated. These galaxies have an ellipsoidal profile, giving them an elliptical appearance regardless of the viewing angle. Their appearance shows little structure and they typically have relatively little interstellar matter . Consequently, these galaxies also have

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1540-618: Is filled with a tenuous gas (the intergalactic medium ) with an average density of less than one atom per cubic metre. Most galaxies are gravitationally organised into groups , clusters and superclusters . The Milky Way is part of the Local Group , which it dominates along with the Andromeda Galaxy . The group is part of the Virgo Supercluster . At the largest scale , these associations are generally arranged into sheets and filaments surrounded by immense voids . Both

1610-461: Is given by the Hubble sequence . Since the Hubble sequence is entirely based upon visual morphological type (shape), it may miss certain important characteristics of galaxies such as star formation rate in starburst galaxies and activity in the cores of active galaxies . Many galaxies are thought to contain a supermassive black hole at their center. This includes the Milky Way, whose core region

1680-668: Is often used to refer to the Milky Way galaxy, to distinguish it from the other galaxies in the observable universe . The English term Milky Way can be traced back to a story by Geoffrey Chaucer c.  1380 : See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë  Which men clepeth the Milky Wey ,  For hit is whyt. Galaxies were initially discovered telescopically and were known as spiral nebulae . Most 18th- to 19th-century astronomers considered them as either unresolved star clusters or anagalactic nebulae , and were just thought of as

1750-417: Is sometimes referred to as a flocculent spiral galaxy ; in contrast to the grand design spiral galaxy that has prominent and well-defined spiral arms. The speed in which a galaxy rotates is thought to correlate with the flatness of the disc as some spiral galaxies have thick bulges, while others are thin and dense. In spiral galaxies, the spiral arms do have the shape of approximate logarithmic spirals ,

1820-583: The University of Nottingham , used 20 years of Hubble images to estimate that the observable universe contained at least two trillion ( 2 × 10 ) galaxies. However, later observations with the New Horizons space probe from outside the zodiacal light reduced this to roughly 200 billion ( 2 × 10 ). Galaxies come in three main types: ellipticals, spirals, and irregulars. A slightly more extensive description of galaxy types based on their appearance

1890-453: The observable universe . Most galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter (approximately 3,000 to 300,000 light years ) and are separated by distances in the order of millions of parsecs (or megaparsecs). For comparison, the Milky Way has a diameter of at least 26,800 parsecs (87,400 ly) and is separated from the Andromeda Galaxy , its nearest large neighbour, by just over 750,000 parsecs (2.5 million ly). The space between galaxies

1960-603: The spectra invisible to humans (radio telescopes, infrared cameras, and x-ray telescopes ) allows detection of other galaxies that are not detected by Hubble. Particularly, surveys in the Zone of Avoidance (the region of sky blocked at visible-light wavelengths by the Milky Way) have revealed a number of new galaxies. A 2016 study published in The Astrophysical Journal , led by Christopher Conselice of

2030-519: The type-cD galaxies . First described in 1964 by a paper by Thomas A. Matthews and others, they are a subtype of the more general class of D galaxies, which are giant elliptical galaxies, except that they are much larger. They are popularly known as the supergiant elliptical galaxies and constitute the largest and most luminous galaxies known. These galaxies feature a central elliptical nucleus with an extensive, faint halo of stars extending to megaparsec scales. The profile of their surface brightnesses as

2100-579: The "Great Andromeda Nebula", as the Andromeda Galaxy, Messier object M31 , was then known. Searching the photographic record, he found 11 more novae . Curtis noticed that these novae were, on average, 10 magnitudes fainter than those that occurred within this galaxy. As a result, he was able to come up with a distance estimate of 150,000  parsecs . He became a proponent of the so-called "island universes" hypothesis, which holds that spiral nebulae are actually independent galaxies. In 1920

2170-525: The 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope yielded improved observations. Among other things, its data helped establish that the missing dark matter in this galaxy could not consist solely of inherently faint and small stars. The Hubble Deep Field , an extremely long exposure of a relatively empty part of the sky, provided evidence that there are about 125 billion ( 1.25 × 10 ) galaxies in the observable universe. Improved technology in detecting

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2240-432: The Hubble classification scheme, spiral galaxies are listed as type S , followed by a letter ( a , b , or c ) which indicates the degree of tightness of the spiral arms and the size of the central bulge. An Sa galaxy has tightly wound, poorly defined arms and possesses a relatively large core region. At the other extreme, an Sc galaxy has open, well-defined arms and a small core region. A galaxy with poorly defined arms

2310-655: The IC ( Index Catalogue ), the CGCG ( Catalogue of Galaxies and of Clusters of Galaxies ), the MCG ( Morphological Catalogue of Galaxies ), the UGC ( Uppsala General Catalogue of Galaxies), and the PGC ( Catalogue of Principal Galaxies , also known as LEDA). All the well-known galaxies appear in one or more of these catalogues but each time under a different number. For example, Messier 109 (or "M109")

2380-608: The Large Magellanic Cloud in his Book of Fixed Stars , referring to "Al Bakr of the southern Arabs", since at a declination of about 70° south it was not visible where he lived. It was not well known to Europeans until Magellan 's voyage in the 16th century. The Andromeda Galaxy was later independently noted by Simon Marius in 1612. In 1734, philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg in his Principia speculated that there might be other galaxies outside that were formed into galactic clusters that were minuscule parts of

2450-536: The Local Group and the Virgo Supercluster are contained in a much larger cosmic structure named Laniakea . The word galaxy was borrowed via French and Medieval Latin from the Greek term for the Milky Way, galaxías (kúklos) γαλαξίας ( κύκλος ) 'milky (circle)', named after its appearance as a milky band of light in the sky. In Greek mythology , Zeus places his son, born by

2520-497: The Milky Way galaxy emerged. A few galaxies outside the Milky Way are visible on a dark night to the unaided eye , including the Andromeda Galaxy , Large Magellanic Cloud , Small Magellanic Cloud , and the Triangulum Galaxy . In the 10th century, Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi made the earliest recorded identification of the Andromeda Galaxy, describing it as a "small cloud". In 964, he probably mentioned

2590-461: The Milky Way might consist of distant stars. Aristotle (384–322 BCE), however, believed the Milky Way was caused by "the ignition of the fiery exhalation of some stars that were large, numerous and close together" and that the "ignition takes place in the upper part of the atmosphere , in the region of the World that is continuous with the heavenly motions ." Neoplatonist philosopher Olympiodorus

2660-431: The Milky Way was a flattened disk of stars, and that some of the nebulae visible in the night sky might be separate Milky Ways. Toward the end of the 18th century, Charles Messier compiled a catalog containing the 109 brightest celestial objects having nebulous appearance. Subsequently, William Herschel assembled a catalog of 5,000 nebulae. In 1845, Lord Rosse examined the nebulae catalogued by Herschel and observed

2730-481: The Milky Way. Despite the prominence of large elliptical and spiral galaxies, most galaxies are dwarf galaxies. They are relatively small when compared with other galactic formations, being about one hundredth the size of the Milky Way, with only a few billion stars. Blue compact dwarf galaxies contains large clusters of young, hot, massive stars . Ultra-compact dwarf galaxies have been discovered that are only 100 parsecs across. Many dwarf galaxies may orbit

2800-402: The Milky Way. In 1926 Hubble produced a classification of galactic morphology that is used to this day. Advances in astronomy have always been driven by technology. After centuries of success in optical astronomy , infrared astronomy was attempted in the 1830s, but only blossomed in the early 1900s. Radio astronomy was born in the 1930s, and matured by the 1950s and 1960s. The problem

2870-537: The Sun was undertaken by William Herschel in 1785 by counting the number of stars in different regions of the sky. He produced a diagram of the shape of the galaxy with the Solar System close to the center . Using a refined approach, Kapteyn in 1920 arrived at the picture of a small (diameter about 15 kiloparsecs) ellipsoid galaxy with the Sun close to the center. A different method by Harlow Shapley based on

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2940-506: The Younger ( c.  495 –570 CE) was critical of this view, arguing that if the Milky Way was sublunary (situated between Earth and the Moon) it should appear different at different times and places on Earth, and that it should have parallax , which it did not. In his view, the Milky Way was celestial. According to Mohani Mohamed, Arabian astronomer Ibn al-Haytham (965–1037) made

3010-407: The active jets emitted from active nuclei. Ultraviolet and X-ray telescopes can observe highly energetic galactic phenomena. Ultraviolet flares are sometimes observed when a star in a distant galaxy is torn apart from the tidal forces of a nearby black hole. The distribution of hot gas in galactic clusters can be mapped by X-rays. The existence of supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies

3080-467: The baby, offered to breastfeed him. But Heracles bit too hard on her breast, hurting her and forcing Hera to cast him aside in pain, as Athena returned him to his mortal parents. A version that diverges significantly from the more known ones states that the milk was not Hera's at all. According to the Roman mythographer Hyginus , when Rhea presented a swaddled rock to her husband Cronus pretending to be

3150-412: The cataloguing of globular clusters led to a radically different picture: a flat disk with diameter approximately 70 kiloparsecs and the Sun far from the centre. Both analyses failed to take into account the absorption of light by interstellar dust present in the galactic plane ; but after Robert Julius Trumpler quantified this effect in 1930 by studying open clusters , the present picture of

3220-749: The central mass is approximately 10 million solar masses , regardless of whether it has thousands or millions of stars. This suggests that galaxies are largely formed by dark matter , and that the minimum size may indicate a form of warm dark matter incapable of gravitational coalescence on a smaller scale. Interactions between galaxies are relatively frequent, and they can play an important role in galactic evolution . Near misses between galaxies result in warping distortions due to tidal interactions , and may cause some exchange of gas and dust. Collisions occur when two galaxies pass directly through each other and have sufficient relative momentum not to merge. The stars of interacting galaxies usually do not collide, but

3290-442: The core, or else due to a tidal interaction with another galaxy. Many barred spiral galaxies are active, possibly as a result of gas being channeled into the core along the arms. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way , is a large disk-shaped barred-spiral galaxy about 30 kiloparsecs in diameter and a kiloparsec thick. It contains about two hundred billion (2×10 ) stars and has a total mass of about six hundred billion (6×10 ) times

3360-399: The core, then merges into the spiral arm structure. In the Hubble classification scheme, these are designated by an SB , followed by a lower-case letter ( a , b or c ) which indicates the form of the spiral arms (in the same manner as the categorization of normal spiral galaxies). Bars are thought to be temporary structures that can occur as a result of a density wave radiating outward from

3430-562: The diameters of their host galaxies. Milk of Hera The ancient Greek word for 'Milky Way' and 'galaxy' both is γαλαξίας , literally meaning "milky", derived from γάλα , which means milk, and is itself from the Proto-Indo-European root *glakt- , *galakt- (compare to the Latin lac ). It was said that once Heracles had been born, either Zeus or his son Hermes took the infant and brought him to Hera , who

3500-476: The first attempt at observing and measuring the Milky Way's parallax, and he thus "determined that because the Milky Way had no parallax, it must be remote from the Earth, not belonging to the atmosphere." Persian astronomer al-Biruni (973–1048) proposed the Milky Way galaxy was "a collection of countless fragments of the nature of nebulous stars." Andalusian astronomer Avempace ( d. 1138) proposed that it

3570-400: The formation of fossil groups or fossil clusters, where a large, relatively isolated, supergiant elliptical resides in the middle of the cluster and are surrounded by an extensive cloud of X-rays as the residue of these galactic collisions. Another older model posits the phenomenon of cooling flow , where the heated gases in clusters collapses towards their centers as they cool, forming stars in

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3640-590: The galaxies' original morphology. If one of the galaxies is much more massive than the other, the result is known as cannibalism , where the more massive larger galaxy remains relatively undisturbed, and the smaller one is torn apart. The Milky Way galaxy is currently in the process of cannibalizing the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy and the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy . Stars are created within galaxies from

3710-448: The gas and dust within the two forms interacts, sometimes triggering star formation. A collision can severely distort the galaxies' shapes, forming bars, rings or tail-like structures. At the extreme of interactions are galactic mergers, where the galaxies' relative momentums are insufficient to allow them to pass through each other. Instead, they gradually merge to form a single, larger galaxy. Mergers can result in significant changes to

3780-470: The higher density. (The velocity returns to normal after the stars depart on the other side of the arm.) This effect is akin to a "wave" of slowdowns moving along a highway full of moving cars. The arms are visible because the high density facilitates star formation, and therefore they harbor many bright and young stars. A majority of spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way galaxy, have a linear, bar-shaped band of stars that extends outward to either side of

3850-432: The infant Zeus, Cronus asked her to nurse the child one last time before he ate it. Rhea complied and pressed her breast against the rock, releasing a bit of milk. Hyginus, while recounting the more traditional story by Eratosthenes, supplants the infant Heracles for the infant Hermes, the son of the nymph Maia , instead. Both Eratosthenes and Hyginus link Heracles breastfeeding Hera to his legitimation as an infant, since

3920-466: The mass in a typical galaxy is in the form of dark matter , with only a few percent of that mass visible in the form of stars and nebulae. Supermassive black holes are a common feature at the centres of galaxies. Galaxies are categorised according to their visual morphology as elliptical , spiral , or irregular . The Milky Way is an example of a spiral galaxy. It is estimated that there are between 200 billion ( 2 × 10 ) to 2 trillion galaxies in

3990-421: The mass of the Sun. Recently, researchers described galaxies called super-luminous spirals. They are very large with an upward diameter of 437,000 light-years (compared to the Milky Way's 87,400 light-year diameter). With a mass of 340 billion solar masses, they generate a significant amount of ultraviolet and mid-infrared light. They are thought to have an increased star formation rate around 30 times faster than

4060-405: The only way for a son of Zeus to be able to receive honours in heaven was through being nursed by Hera, with Hyginus providing an additional example with Hermes. Neither Diodorus nor Pausanias make such connection between the breastfeeding and Heracles suckling from his father's wife breast; Diodorus mentions another ritual, which included a mock labour with Hera acting as Alcmene, as the way Heracles

4130-474: The process, a phenomenon observed in clusters such as Perseus , and more recently in the Phoenix Cluster . A shell galaxy is a type of elliptical galaxy where the stars in its halo are arranged in concentric shells. About one-tenth of elliptical galaxies have a shell-like structure, which has never been observed in spiral galaxies. These structures are thought to develop when a larger galaxy absorbs

4200-439: The sources in these two types of galaxies may differ. Radio galaxies can also be classified as giant radio galaxies (GRGs), whose radio emissions can extend to scales of megaparsecs (3.26 million light-years). Alcyoneus is an FR II class low-excitation radio galaxy which has the largest observed radio emission, with lobed structures spanning 5 megaparsecs (16×10 ly ). For comparison, another similarly sized giant radio galaxy

4270-522: The sphere of the fixed stars." Actual proof of the Milky Way consisting of many stars came in 1610 when the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study it and discovered it was composed of a huge number of faint stars. In 1750, English astronomer Thomas Wright , in his An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe , correctly speculated that it might be a rotating body of

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4340-576: The spiral structure of Messier object M51 , now known as the Whirlpool Galaxy. In 1912, Vesto M. Slipher made spectrographic studies of the brightest spiral nebulae to determine their composition. Slipher discovered that the spiral nebulae have high Doppler shifts , indicating that they are moving at a rate exceeding the velocity of the stars he had measured. He found that the majority of these nebulae are moving away from us. In 1917, Heber Doust Curtis observed nova S Andromedae within

4410-498: The universe that extended far beyond what could be seen. These views "are remarkably close to the present-day views of the cosmos." In 1745, Pierre Louis Maupertuis conjectured that some nebula -like objects were collections of stars with unique properties, including a glow exceeding the light its stars produced on their own, and repeated Johannes Hevelius 's view that the bright spots were massive and flattened due to their rotation. In 1750, Thomas Wright correctly speculated that

4480-442: The universe's early history, but still contribute an estimated 15% to total star production. Starburst galaxies are characterized by dusty concentrations of gas and the appearance of newly formed stars, including massive stars that ionize the surrounding clouds to create H II regions . These stars produce supernova explosions, creating expanding remnants that interact powerfully with the surrounding gas. These outbursts trigger

4550-724: The word universe implied the entirety of existence. Instead, they became known simply as galaxies. Millions of galaxies have been catalogued, but only a few have well-established names, such as the Andromeda Galaxy , the Magellanic Clouds , the Whirlpool Galaxy , and the Sombrero Galaxy . Astronomers work with numbers from certain catalogues, such as the Messier catalogue , the NGC ( New General Catalogue ),

4620-416: Was composed of many stars that almost touched one another, and appeared to be a continuous image due to the effect of refraction from sublunary material, citing his observation of the conjunction of Jupiter and Mars as evidence of this occurring when two objects were near. In the 14th century, Syrian-born Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya proposed the Milky Way galaxy was "a myriad of tiny stars packed together in

4690-405: Was confirmed through X-ray astronomy. In 1944, Hendrik van de Hulst predicted that microwave radiation with wavelength of 21 cm would be detectable from interstellar atomic hydrogen gas; and in 1951 it was observed. This radiation is not affected by dust absorption, and so its Doppler shift can be used to map the motion of the gas in this galaxy. These observations led to the hypothesis of

4760-463: Was legitimized after his apotheosis . Whatever the details and the circumstances of the myth, it was said that the divine milk that spilt and sprayed across the heavens became the Milky Way galaxy, known to the ancient Greeks as Galaxias Kyklos ( Ancient Greek : Γαλαξίας Κύκλος , lit.   'the milky circle'). This rather dramatic myth has been depicted throughout history by many artists, including Tintoretto and Rubens . In

4830-544: Was sleeping, and placed him to her breast so that he could suckle from her. Once Hera awoke and understood the situation, she pushed the baby away, and her unexpressed milk was sprayed. This story was attributed to (pseudo-) Eratosthenes . In another telling, after Alcmene managed to bring forth both infants, she grew fearful of Hera's wrath and imminent retribution, so she exposed the infant in some field. The goddess Athena , Heracles' half-sister, found him and brought him to Hera, without revealing his identity. Hera, admiring

4900-493: Was that air only allows visible light and radio waves to pass, with a little bit of near infrared. The first ultraviolet telescope was launched in 1968, and since then there's been major progress in all regions of the electromagnetic spectrum . The dust present in the interstellar medium is opaque to visual light. It is more transparent to far-infrared , which can be used to observe the interior regions of giant molecular clouds and galactic cores in great detail. Infrared

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