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10. Stars and galaxies
| 10.13 |
Our living galaxy-the Milky Way
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| We will look at our own Galaxy, the Milky Way in detail in the context of understanding of the Milky Way as being a living ecosystem. | ||
| The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, containing some 100 billion stars ( suns), many which have planetary systems. If you were able to look above and back towards the galaxy, its appearance would be similar to looking at a cyclone/hurricane. | ||
| 10.12.1 | Main features of the Milky Way | |
| Kpc (stand for Kilo Parsec , or thousands of parsecs. 1 parsec = 3.26 light years). | ||
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| Galactic Core | ||
| At the centre of the Milky Way is a concentrated core (around 30,000 light years in diameter) containing most of the mass (Suns) of the Galaxy. | ||
| The core region rotates at incredible speeds, completing a rotation (at the edge of the 30,000 light year perimeter) around once every 60 to 80 million years. | ||
| The core itself is made up several components- an outer sheath of high temperature gases and nebulae-like clouds, while at the perimeter and further into the core are hundreds of millions of Red Giants- older stars at the end of their life. | ||
| Scientists have identified that the core of our Galaxy is the largest source of cosmic radiation and massive volumes of radioactive particles, capable of escaping the haze of nebulae clouds in our region of space. These massive particle emissions are consistent with the belief that at the centre of our Galaxy are dozens and dozens of neutron stars with the capacity of attracting stars inward and tearing them apart. | ||
| Because of the tremendous attraction pull of the central core, all stars in our Galaxy are gradually being attracted towards the centre at the same time they rotate in localized clusters at various distances from the galactic core. | ||
| Galactic Disc | ||
| Stretching out on an equatorial plane from the central core of the galaxy are spiral arms of hundreds of millions of stars. Our Sun is located in a localized group of Suns on this equatorial plane around 26,000 to 28,000 Light Years from the galactic centre of the Milky Way. At this point, the disk is slightly less than 1,000 light years thick (compared to around 30,000 light years for the galactic core). | ||
| The galactic disc itself stretches out for around 35,000 light years on either side of the core completing the total estimated diameter of the Milky Way of around 100,000 light years. | ||
| Unlike planets orbiting a Sun, the disk is not arranged in even densities of matter orbiting, but concentrated clusters of hundreds of thousands of Suns, arranged in spiraling arms of tens of millions of suns from the edge of the galactic core to the edges of the disc region. | ||
| Within the disc region, the rotation speeds of the groups of Suns are significantly lower. It is estimated for example that our Sun (around 30 light years or 8000 parsecs from the centre of the Galaxy) orbits the core at more than 260 km/sec to complete a rotation every 220,000,000 to 230,000,000 Earth years. | ||
| Given the powerful attraction forces of the galactic core, the rotation rate of our Sun and localized group of Suns is likely to have been getting shorter for (at an increasing rate) for some time. | ||
| Halo | ||
| Directly above and below the galactic core (at 90 degrees to the disc) are huge plumes of gases as well as the thickest streams of particle fields from the centre, stretching outwards in a spherical fashion. This is called the "Halo". | ||
| Within the halo of the galaxy are about two hundred dense clusters of stars, fairly evenly distributed, many of them lying above or below the plane of the galaxy. Each of these clusters contains up to some hundreds of thousands of stars in a roughly spherical grouping and are therefore called globular clusters. | ||
| The existence of these groups of stars off the equatorial plane, indicates that the particle fields of the Galaxy are immensely strong, the particle fields themselves capable of attracting large groups of Stars. | ||
| While it has never been properly speculated by science, it is likely that these globular clusters are either being pushed outwards, given that directly above and below the galactic core are the exit points for the massive particle fields of the galaxy. | ||
| Nebulae fields | ||
| At the edge of the disc- where the massive particle fields return (the particle fields, like our own solar system, return largely along the equatorial plane) are huge fields of nebulae gases. | ||
| This is totally consistent with our own Sun sending out its particle fields above and below the equatorial plane and the particle fields returning along the plane to the Sun. As the galactic particle fields search out nearby space for "building" particles, the logol location for these nurseries for stars is at the edge of the disc. Science confirms that this is the second location (the halo being the other region) where new stars are being born in our galaxy. | ||
| Galactic Corona | ||
| Stretching way beyond the disc and central galactic core, the massive ergon particle fields of our galaxy envelope a region of space somewhere around five times (in strength) and (fifteen times in weaker attraction) to the diameter of our galaxy. | ||
| In other words, the catchment area for material for our galaxy is somewhere in the region of 500,000 light years in diameter and to a weaker extent around 1.5 million light years in diameter. | ||
| The galactic ergon particle fields within the 500,000 light year diameter are strong enough to pull smaller galaxies (less than half the mass of our own galaxy) into orbits around our own galaxy, as we shall see in a moment. | ||
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