Transcript Document

Modern Astronomy
Stars & Galaxies
Lecture 8
Galaxies: From normal
Galaxies to quasars
Geraint F. Lewis
University of Sydney 2007
Outline
The Milky Way: A reminder
 The family of galaxies
 Colliding galaxies
 AGN: The eccentric cousins
 Cosmological Spaghetti

The Milky Way: A reminder
Scientific notation & units
Scientific numbers;
103=1000 and 4.1£ 102 = 410
Solar mass:
M¯ = 1.99£1030 kg
Solar luminosity: L¯ = 3.90£1026 W
Parsec:
pc = 3.09£1016 m
The family of galaxies
Spiral
Elliptical
Irregular
Spiral Galaxies
Mass:
109!4£1011 M¯
8
10 L¯
 Luminosity:10 !2£10
 Diameter:
5!50 kpc
 Stars:
All ages
 Gas & dust:
Some
 Rotation:
Yes

Classifying spirals: Sa
Large bulge-to-disk
ratio!
Classifying spirals: Sb
Lower bulge-todisk ratio
ESO
Classifying spirals: Sc
Small bulge-to-disk
ratio
HST
Classifying spirals: bars
Sa
Sb
Sc
Lenticular (S0)
Elliptical Galaxies
Mass:
105!1013 M¯
5
10 L¯
 Luminosity:3£10 !10
 Diameter:
1!200 kpc
 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….
… is art!!
Irregular Galaxies: The dustbin
Mass:
108!3£1010 M¯
7
9
 Luminosity:10 !10 L¯
 Diameter:
1!10 kpc
 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 we look hard, 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 galaxies in the Universe are seen
to live in groups similar to our own!

Galaxy groups
Stephan’s Quintet
Hickson Group
Gemini images
Galaxy clusters
While rarer, galaxy clusters represent
the largest bound objects in the
Universe
 The can contain thousands of galaxies
 Galaxy clusters can be grouped together
to make superclusters of galaxies!

The Coma Cluster
The not-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 Way)
 Galaxies whip around clusters at
thousands of km/s (evidence for dark
matter)
 The immense gravitational field
squeezes gas in the cluster, making it
hot and glow in X-rays!

X-ray clusters
The Centaurus Cluster
Large scale structure
www.sdss.org
Numbers
The observable Universe contains

Around 100 billion galaxies

Containing ~1022 stars

Galaxies sit on a cosmological foam

Mainly ellipticals in clusters

Mainly spirals “in the field”
Galaxy collisions
With so many galaxies in a small
volume, collisions occur.
What happens?
Material is thrown over a large
region.
Stars: rush passed one another and
do not collide
Gas: clouds collide and collapse,
resulting in a burst of star
formation
Galaxy collisions
John Dubinski
http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~dubinski/nbody/
Galaxy collisions
Painting by Adolf Schaller
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
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 of a galaxy during a collision?

AGN: Eccentric cousins



The light we receive from a galaxy is simply
the sum of the light of each star
Sometimes galaxies have a bright core, but
the radiation is not starlight
Often this bright 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, strong magnetic fields,
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 are many different kinds of AGN
Quasars, Seyferts, Blazars, Liners, BL Lac, FR I,
FR II etc.
Classification depends upon energy output, how
they were discovered…
The idea is, however, that all AGN are variants
of the same theme, a power source which
consists of a supermassive 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, but can output as much
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 questions are not easy to answer,
and require building a universe inside a
computer. We will look at this in more
detail next week, but for now..
A numerical universe



Little things 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
quickly, rotation destroyed
Spirals: Formed more sedately, slow recycling of
gas, rotation maintained
What does this mean for Andromeda and the
Milky Way who meet in 3 billion years?
See you next week!
http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~dubinski/tflops/