Galaxies

This is a most interesting show about galaxies.
I really got into this one.

See, there was this guy SHAPLEY with the 13 inch 
waste, well he discovered that our galaxy was pretty big (200,000 lights years) and determined that our 
solar system was NOT at the center.  Then he kind of got crazy with power and continued to say that 
everything that could be observed in space was part 
of our galaxy.  What a chauvinist!

Well, Edwin Hubble (who would name their baby 
Edwin?) and Milton Humason (no astronomer ever has a regular name) discovered the Andromeda Nebula and 
proved old SHAPLEY wrong about everything being in 
one galaxy.
Shapley, died, Hubble and Humason lived and the rest is history. (Pass the pizza will ya?)

Not only were there other galaxies, but our galaxy 
was EXPANDING.  
(This is stuff for Speilberg--"The Galaxy Under the 
Stairs"  or "Galaxy Cemetery")

Another astronomer by the name Percival Lowell 
brought on his buddy Vesto  Slipher to take Spectra 
of the Spiral Nebulae which were thought of as 
planetary systems forming.  He found Spectrum of the 
Spiral Nebulae had shifted to the red end of
spectrum. Vesto Slipher had discovered the greater
the distance the greater the red shift known as 
HUBBLE'S LAW.

Our galaxies have three different shapes:
   ELLIPTICAL GALAXY
   SPIRAL GALAXY and
   IRREGULAR GALAXY
The elliptical galaxies are round in appearance. 
They have almost no visible gas or dust: have no 
bright or hot stars and no spiral pattern.

The spiral galaxies have old and new stars and have 
an edge.  This type of galaxy is shaped like that of a disk with a nuclear bulge in the center. Spiral 
galaxies come in three classes.  

There are BARRED SPIRAL GALAXIES which have very 
long shape of the nuclear bulge. There is the SO 
galaxies which show no spiral arms and have very few
stars and little dust and gas and no disk component. 
The last but not least is the Normal Spiral. 

This Normal Spiral is subclassified into three 
categories according to size and the nuclear bulge. 
They tend to look in between an elliptical and the 
distinct length of the arms.
 
The shapes of the galaxy came about with initial 
formation and had alot to do with environmental 
conditions of merging together.

A STARBURST GALAXY is a galaxy currently forming 
stars.  This starburst formation is when galaxies 
collide or interact gravitationally. So gravity has 
alot to do with the formation of the galaxies and 
their shapes.     

Collisions are more frequent because galaxies are 
moving closer together and you thought collisions 
only happened on the highways.  Pretty soon as these
galaxies collide they begin to get swallowed up by
larger galaxies. This is called GALATIC CANNIBALISM.
I never knew that galaxies had an appetite! That means our nearest galaxy called the ANDROMEDA GALAXY could eat our galaxy. Chances are if that happens, our galaxy would just be expanded fortunately.
This because our local group is still expanding.

Galaxies are found in clumps.  Some galaxies are separated by a dark space because most of the mass in space is invisible and is not luminous.  This is known as DARK MATTER. 

BUBBLE MODE is when all galaxies form in a super cluster which forms an attractor.  This is a continent of dark matter with other galaxies and they have a higher concentration of matter which makes our galaxy and others around it streams towards the great attractor.

Because of our small density fluctuations initially thought as a void, there are more galaxies we now define as our UNIVERSE.



Email:  
paulborkowski@galaxy5.com