The bright glow of the Milky Way, stretching across the night sky, is one of the most magnificent natural attractions that you can imagine. For thousands of years, people have been staring at the stars with inspiration. Now we know that the wonderful streak of light is actually a view of our native galaxy from the inside. How beautiful the Milky Way! The color of this extraordinary giant object, true and scientifically sound, is finally determined by scientists.
Typical spiral
The term "Milky Way", which once denoted a nebula from a cluster of stars in the night sky, was later adopted as a name for our Galaxy as a whole. The name is based on a characteristic color. The Milky Way is a typical spiral galaxy with various structural components. It contains a thin disk with a diameter of approximately 100,000 light years. It is surrounded by a convex thick disk (approximately 25,000 light years). It is shorter and older because The Milky Way formed as if inside out.
There is also a star halo, which is home to about 150 globular clusters. The sun is one of the hundreds of billions of stars that make up the Milky Way. The star is in a thin disk (about 25,000 light years from the center of the bulge). Initially, according to the Hubble sequence, they thought it was a spiral galaxy of the shape of Sb or Sc (SBC).
Beyond Thin Disk
Astronomers later suggested that the Milky Way has a central bar (jumper). Therefore, it is a loosely wound, Hubble-type spiral SBBC galaxy. In addition to its visible structure, the Milky Way, whose color has long been considered a mystery, contains a dark halo. It presumably does not consist of stellar (possibly even not baryonic) matter. This spherical halo extends far beyond the edge of a thin disk. And the movements of galaxies around the Milky Way suggest that the total mass is 1,000 billion solar masses. This is ten times the limits of the visible material!
No isolation
What color is the Milky Way? It would seem that in millions of years one could understand this. However, given our position in it (inside the long sleeve), everything is not so simple. It will seem surprising, but the formation of the Milky Way is still an active area of research. Its various stellar components are believed to have appeared at different times. First, stars formed, still found in a thin disk. Now the process of formation of three famous galaxies continues. The mechanism includes collapse, hierarchical clustering and secular evolution.
Like most star systems, the Milky Way does not exist in isolation. Along with the Andromeda nebula, the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, and nearly thirty dwarf galaxies, it is an integral part of the Local Group. Their main characteristic is color. The Milky Way (photo below), according to an ancient Greek legend, is named so by chance.
Milk of the goddess Hera
Legend has it that Zeus had a son Heracles, whom a mortal woman gave birth to. Therefore, he could not be considered a god. At the same time, his wife Hera was breast-feeding a legitimate child. And the husband had a plan how to make little Hercules immortal. He had to drink Hera's breast milk while she was sleeping. Waking up, the goddess saw that she was not feeding her child, pushed the alien baby away. A stream of breast milk sprinkled and turned into the Milky Way.
According to scientists, the light tone is very different. There are galaxies that are similar in color, but there are completely different ones. First of all, high minds in the field of astronomical research were puzzled by the exact determination of the color of the native star system - the Milky Way. A group of employees from the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, United States of America) began work. And after serious research, they found the answer.
Spring snow at dawn
This is a very important finding. Exclusively on the basis of color about the galaxy, you can learn a lot of new things, for example, how many years it will live, producing stars, the age of the stars themselves. Being inside a star cluster makes the Milky Way super-mysterious. The color of the object is perceived by us distorted. And it happened! Astronomers have installed it from the perspective of an outside observer.
So what color is the Milky Way in reality? He's white. More precisely, the colors of fresh spring snow for several hours shortly after dawn. So consider Jeffrey Newman and Tim Licquia. They brought out the shade of the Milky Way by averaging data obtained from the observation of 1000 such galaxies.
Evolution continues
What else resembles your color, the Milky Way? Space, far and huge, gave rise to another comparison among people: “About halfway between the light from the old style incandescent lamps and the standard spectrum of white on the TV screen.” So what happens: gentle flowing milk has nothing to do with it? But what about the original name of the galaxy? We will not be categorical. Once again, clouds of gas and dust do not provide a wide view. For countless years, this did not allow astronomers to get the idea that the Milky Way looks like a whole.
According to Newman, the problem also lies in the fact that it is very difficult to make an unambiguous description. This is the same as determining the overall color of the Earth based on, for example, the view of the state of Pennsylvania. Indeed, the Milky Way color actually has a complex: a mixture of red shades from the galactic core and blue from its spiral arms. Scarlet corresponds to the part of the galaxy where star formation is rare. At the same time, blue indicates the place where stars are still born. The Milky Way is between these two stages in a state of evolution.