Ever Imagined How Big is Our Milky Way Galaxy?

Radius: 52,850 light years
Stars: 25,000 crores ± 15,000 crores
Sun's Galactic rotation period: 240 Myr
Sun's distance to Galactic Center: 26.4 ± 1.0 kly (8.09 ± 0.3kpc)
Escape velocity at Sun's position: 550 km/s
Thickness of thin stellar disk: ≈2 kly (0.6 kpc)

Milky Way Galaxy, large spiral system consisting of several hundred billion stars, one of which is the Sun. It takes its name from the Milky Way, the irregular luminous band of stars and gas clouds that stretches across the sky as seen from Earth. Although Earth lies well within the Milky Way Galaxy (sometimes simply called the Galaxy), astronomers do not have as complete an understanding of its nature as they do of some external star systems. A thick layer of interstellar dust obscures much of the Galaxy from scrutiny by optical telescopes, and astronomers can determine its large-scale structure only with the aid of radio and infrared telescopes, which can detect the forms of radiation that penetrate the obscuring matter.

Major components of the Galaxy

Star clusters and stellar associations

Although most stars in the Galaxy exist either as single stars like the Sun or as double stars, there are many conspicuous groups and clusters of stars that contain tens to thousands of members. These objects can be subdivided into three types: globular clusters, open clusters, and stellar associations. They differ primarily in age and in the number of member stars.

 

Globular clusters

The largest and most massive star clusters are the globular clusters, so called because of their roughly spherical appearance. The Galaxy contains more than 150 globular clusters (the exact number is uncertain because of obscuration by dust in the Milky Way band, which probably prevents some globular clusters from being seen). They are arranged in a nearly spherical halo around the Milky Way, with relatively few toward the galactic plane but a heavy concentration toward the centre. The radial distribution, when plotted as a function of distance from the galactic centre, fits a mathematical expression of a form identical to the one describing the star distribution in elliptical galaxies.

Globular clusters are extremely luminous objects. Their mean luminosity is the equivalent of approximately 25,000 Suns. The most luminous are 50 times brighter. The masses of globular clusters, measured by determining the dispersion in the velocities of individual stars, range from a few thousand to more than 1,000,000 solar masses. The clusters are very large, with diameters measuring from 10 to as much as 300 light-years. Most globular clusters are highly concentrated at their centres, having stellar distributions that resemble isothermal gas spheres with a cutoff that corresponds to the tidal effects of the Galaxy. A precise model of star distribution within a cluster can be derived from stellar dynamics, which takes into account the kinds of orbits that stars have in the cluster, encounters between these member stars, and the effects of exterior influences. The American astronomer Ivan R. King, for instance, derived dynamical models that fit observed stellar distributions very closely. He finds that a cluster’s structure can be described in terms of two numbers: (1) the core radius, which measures the degree of concentration at the centre, and (2) the tidal radius, which measures the cutoff of star densities at the edge of the cluster.

 

A key distinguishing feature of globular clusters in the Galaxy is their uniformly old age. Determined by comparing the stellar population of globular clusters with stellar evolutionary models, the ages of all those so far measured range from 11 billion to 13 billion years. They are the oldest objects in the Galaxy and so must have been among the first formed. That this was the case is also indicated by the fact that the globular clusters tend to have much smaller amounts of heavy elements than do the stars in the plane of the Galaxy, e.g., the Sun. Composed of stars belonging to the extreme Population II (see below Stars and stellar populations), as well as the high-latitude halo stars, these nearly spherical assemblages apparently formed before the material of the Galaxy flattened into the present thin disk. As their component stars evolved, they gave up some of their gas to interstellar space. This gas was enriched in the heavy elements (i.e., elements heavier than helium) produced in stars during the later stages of their evolution, so that the interstellar gas in the Galaxy is continually being changed. Hydrogen and helium have always been the major constituents, but heavy elements have gradually grown in importance. The present interstellar gas contains elements heavier than helium at a level of about 2 percent by mass, while the globular clusters contain as little as 0.02 percent of the same elements.

 

Open clusters

Clusters smaller and less massive than the globular clusters are found in the plane of the Galaxy intermixed with the majority of the system’s stars, including the Sun. These objects are the open clusters, so called because they generally have a more open, loose appearance than typical globular clusters.

The brightest open clusters are considerably fainter than the brightest globular clusters. The peak absolute luminosity appears to be about 50,000 times the luminosity of the Sun, but the largest percentage of known open clusters has a brightness equivalent to 500 solar luminosities. Masses can be determined from the dispersion in the measured velocities of individual stellar members of clusters. Most open clusters have small masses on the order of 50 solar masses. Their total populations of stars are small, ranging from tens to a few thousand.

Open clusters have diameters of only 2 or 3 to about 20 light-years, with the majority being less than 5 light-years across. In structure they look very different from globular clusters, though they can be understood in terms of similar dynamical models. The most important structural difference is their small total mass and relative looseness, which result from their comparatively large core radii. These two features have disastrous consequences as far as their ultimate fate is concerned, because open clusters are not sufficiently gravitationally bound to be able to withstand the disruptive tidal effects in the Galaxy (see star cluster: Open clusters). Judging from the sample of open clusters within 3,000 light-years of the Sun, only half of them can withstand such tidal forces for more than 200 million years, and a mere 2 percent have life expectancies as high as 1 billion years.

Stellar associations

Even younger than open clusters, stellar associations are very loose groupings of young stars that share a common place and time of origin but that are not generally tied closely enough together gravitationally to form a stable cluster. Stellar associations are limited strictly to the plane of the Galaxy and appear only in regions of the system where star formation is occurring, notably in the spiral arms. They are very luminous objects. The brightest are even brighter than the brightest globular clusters, but this is not because they contain more stars; instead it is the result of the fact that their constituent stars are very much brighter than the stars constituting globular clusters. The most luminous stars in stellar associations are very young stars of spectral types O and B. They have absolute luminosities as bright as any star in the Galaxy—on the order of one million times the luminosity of the Sun. Such stars have very short lifetimes, only lasting a few million years. With luminous stars of this type there need not be very many to make up a highly luminous and conspicuous grouping. The total masses of stellar associations amount to only a few hundred solar masses, with the population of stars being in the hundreds or, in a few cases, thousands.

The sizes of stellar associations are large; the average diameter of those in the Galaxy is about 250 light-years. They are so large and loosely structured that their self-gravitation is insufficient to hold them together, and in a matter of a few million years the members disperse into surrounding space, becoming separate and unconnected stars in the galactic field.

Moving groups

These objects are organizations of stars that share common measurable motions. Sometimes these do not form a noticeable cluster. This definition allows the term to be applied to a range of objects from the nearest gravitationally bound clusters to groups of widely spread stars with no apparent gravitational identity, which are discovered only by searching the catalogs for stars of common motion. Among the best known of the moving groups is the Hyades in the constellation Taurus. Also known as the Taurus moving cluster or the Taurus stream, this system comprises the relatively dense Hyades cluster along with a few very distant members. It contains a total of about 350 stars, including several white dwarfs. Its centre lies about 150 light-years away. Other notable moving stellar groups include the Ursa Major, Scorpius-Centaurus, and Pleiades groups. Besides these remote organizations, investigators have observed what appear to be groups of high-velocity stars near the Sun. One of these, called the Groombridge 1830 group, consists of a number of subdwarfs and the star RR Lyrae, after which the RR Lyrae variables were named