Modern Astronomy

Stars & Galaxies

Lecture 8
Galaxies: From normal
Galaxies to quasars
q
Geraint F. Lewis
University of Sydney 2005
 Outline
‹ The Milky Way: A reminder
‹ The family of galaxies

‹ Colliding
C llidi galaxies
l i
‹ AGN: The eccentric cousins

‹ Cosmological Spaghetti
The Milky Way: A reminder
 Scientific notation & units
Scientific numbers;
103=1000 and 4.1£
4.1£ 102 = 410

Solar mass: M¯ = 1.99£

1.99£1030 kg
Solar luminosity: L¯ = 3.90£
3.90£1026 W
Parsec: pc = 3.09£
3 09£
3.09
09£1016 m
 The family of galaxies

Spiral
Elliptical

Irregular
 Spiral Galaxies
‹ Mass: 109!4£1011 M¯
‹ Luminosity: 108!2£1010 L¯
‹ Diameter:
Di t 5!50 kpc
k
‹ Stars: All ages
‹ Gas & dust: Some
‹ Rotation: Yes
Classifying spirals: Sa

Large bulge
bulge--to
to--disk
ratio!
Classifying spirals: Sb

Lower bulge
bulge--to
to--
disk ratio

ESO
Classifying spirals: Sc

Small bulge
bulge--to
to--disk
ratio

HST
Classifying spirals: bars

Sa

Sb

Sc
Lenticular (S0)
 Elliptical Galaxies
‹ Mass: 105!1013 M¯
‹ Luminosity: 3£105!1010 L¯
‹ Diameter:
Di t 1!200 kpc
k
‹ Stars: Intermediate + Old
‹ Gas & dust: Very little
‹ Rotation: Very little
Classifying Elliptical
Ellipticals are classified on the basis of their shape
and are assigned a number

where a is the longest length and b is the

shortest length (i.e. circular is equal to zero)

E1

E5
 Hubble tuning fork

http://www.uni-sw.gwdg.de/~bziegler/images/galaxies/tuningfork_Frei.gif
Classification….
Classification

… is art!!
 Irregular Galaxies: The dustbin
‹ Mass: 108!3£1010 M¯
‹ Luminosity: 107!109 L¯
‹ Diameter:
Di t 1!10 kpc
k
‹ Stars: Young & Intermediate
‹ Gas & dust: Lots
‹ Rotation: Yes & No
Irregular galaxies

Large Magellanic Cloud

Irregular galaxies

Image credit: Westmoquette (UCL), WIYN/NASA/HST

 The big and the small
‹ Big galaxies are relatively easy to see
‹ Small galaxies are hard to see

‹ Whenever
Wh we look
l k hard,
h d we see many
small galaxies for every large galaxy!
‹ This is true in our very own backyard
The Local Group
 Where do galaxies live?
‹ Galaxies rarely live alone
‹ The Milky Way is part of the Local Group
with Andromeda and many smaller
galaxies
‹ Most
M t galaxies
l i iin th
the Universe
U i are seen
to live in groups similar to our own!
 Galaxy groups

Stephan’s Quintet Hickson Group

Gemini images
 Galaxy clusters
‹ While rarer,
rarer galaxy clusters represent
the largest bound objects in the
Universe
‹ The can contain thousands of galaxies

‹ Galaxy
G l clusters
l t can b
be groupedd together
t th
to make superclusters of galaxies!
The Coma Cluster
 The not
not--so
so--local Universe

The little black dot is out Local

Group of galaxies.
The side length of the box is
~200Mpc (more than 200x the
distance between us and
Andromeda).
The Local Group is pulled by the
gravitational attraction of the
clusters and we are falling into
the Virgo Cluster!!!

Mike Hudson (U Waterloo)

Abell 1689
(HST)
 Galaxy clusters
‹ Usually at the centre of galaxy clusters
we mind cD galaxies, the most massive
galaxies we know ((100x Milky
g y Way)
y)
‹ Galaxies whip around clusters at
thousands of km/s ((evidence for dark
matter)
‹ The immense g gravitational field
squeezes gas in the cluster, making it
hot and glow in X-
X-rays!
X-ray clusters

The Centaurus Cluster

Large scale structure

www.sdss.org
 Numbers
The observable Universe contains
‹ Around 100 billion galaxies
‹ C t i i
Containing ~101022 stars
t
‹ Galaxies sit on a cosmological foam
‹ Mainly ellipticals in clusters
‹ Mainly spirals “in
in the field”
field
Galaxy collisions
With so many galaxies in a small
volume collisions occur.
volume, occur
What happens?
Material is thrown over a large
region.

Stars: rush passed one another and

Stars:
do not collide

Gas: clouds collide and collapse,

Gas: p ,
resulting in a burst of star
formation
Galaxy collisions

John Dubinski
http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~dubinski/nbody/
Galaxy collisions

Painting by Adolf Sch

haller
Sometimes gas pools into the centre of
the colliding system, resulting in a
massive burst of star formation (more
than 1000 new stars per year!)
This burst produces masses of dust in
supernovae making the galaxy glow
supernovae,
brightly in the infrared.
 Feeding the monster!
‹ Remember that the heart of the Milky
Way houses a supermassive black hole
‹ Detailed observations of stars in the
centres of other nearby galaxies reveal
that they too have black holes
‹ What happens when gas sinks into the

centre
t off a galaxy
l during
d i a collision?
lli i ?
 AGN: Eccentric cousins
‹ The light we receive from a galaxy is simply
the sum of the light of each star
‹ Sometimes
So et es galaxies
ga a es have
a e a bright
b g t core,
co e, but
the radiation is not starlight
‹ Often this bright
g core outshines the entire
starlight of a galaxy

Such bright cores are the signatures of Active

Galactic Nuclei (AGN)
 Active galaxies Active galaxy

Starlight

• Non-thermal emission: High speed

electrons,
l t strong
t magnetic
ti fi
fields,
ld
extreme environments
•Broad emission line: High speed gas
•~10% have strong radio emission
 Radio jets

Jets can cover several hundred kiloparsecs to a couple of

megaparsecs (remember the Milky Way has a diameter of
several 10s of kiloparsecs).

Cygnus A (6cm Carilli NRAO/AUI)

 Active galaxies
There
e e are
a e many
a y different
d e e t kinds
ds of
o AGN
G
Quasars, Seyferts, Blazars, Liners, BL Lac, FR I,
FR II etc.

Classification depends upon energy output, how

th
they were discovered…
di d

The idea is
is, however
however, that all AGN are variants
of the same theme, a power source which
consists of a supermassive
p black hole.
The unified model
‹ Supermassive black hole
‹ Accretion disk of hot gas
‹ Jets
‹ High velocity clouds
‹ Thick torus of gas, dust & stars
‹ Low velocity clouds

All of this is packed in a volume

not much larger than the solar
system,
t b
butt can output
t t as much
h
energy as a 100,000 billion
Suns.
The unified model

What you see depends upon

which angle you are looking
at the central black hole!
 Cosmological spaghetti
Where do galaxies come from?
• Were they born fully formed?
• Did they grow over time?

Such
S h questions
ti are nott easy to t answer,
and require building a universe inside a
computer.
t W
We will
ill llook
k att thi
this in
i more
detail next week, but for now..
 A numerical universe
‹ Little things
g form first
‹ Little things merger to become bigger
‹ Ultimately a few large things dominate and
continually feed on the smaller objects

This suggests that an object like the Milky Way has not
finished feeding. As we saw last week, there are
several dwarf galaxies, including the Sagittarius dwarf
and Canis Major dwarf which are being consumed at
the moment!
 Elliptical vs spiral
Ellipticals: Violent formation, all gas used up
Ellipticals:
quickly, rotation destroyed
Spirals:
Spirals
Sp a s: Formed
o ed more o e sedately,
sedate y, slow
s o recycling
ecyc g
of gas, rotation maintained

What does this mean for Andromeda and the

Milky Way who meet in 3 billion years?
 http://www.c
cita.utoronto..ca/~dubinsk
ki/tflops/
See you next week!