Milky Way: color, photo

The bright glow of the Milky Way, stretching through the night sky, is one of the most magnificent natural sights that you can imagine. For thousands of years people have been staring at the stars with inspiration. Now we know that a wonderful strip of light is actually a kind of our native galaxy from the inside. How beautiful the Milky Way! The color of this extraordinary giant object, true and scientifically grounded, is finally determined by scientists.

A typical spiral

The term "Milky Way", once denoting a nebula from a cluster of stars in the night sky, was later adopted as the name for our Galaxy as a whole. The basis of the name was a characteristic color. The Milky Way is a typical spiral galaxy with different structural components. It contains a thin disc about 100,000 light-years in diameter. It is enveloped by a bulging thick disk (about 25,000 light-years). It is shorter and older, because The Milky Way was formed as if "inside out."

There is also a starry 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 light is in a thin disk (about 25,000 light-years from the center of the bulge). Initially, according to the Hubble sequence, it was thought that this was a spiral galaxy of the shape of Sb or Sc (SBC).

Beyond the Thin Disk

Later, astronomers suggested that the Milky Way has a central bar (jumper). Consequently, it is a weakly wound, Hubble spiral galaxy of the SBBC type. In addition to its visible structure, the Milky Way, whose color has long been considered a mystery, contains a dark halo. It presumably consists not of stellar (possibly, not even of baryonic) matter. This spherical halo extends far beyond the edge of the thin disk. And the movements of galaxies around the Milky Way suggest that the total mass is 1000 billion solar masses. This is ten times more than the limits of the visible material!

No isolation

What color is the Milky Way? It would seem that for millions of years it could be understood. However, given our position in it (inside the long sleeve), everything is not so simple. It seems 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 were formed, still encountered in a thin disk. Now the process of formation of three known galaxies is continuing. 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 almost thirty dwarf galaxies, it is an integral part of the Local Group. Their main characteristic is color. The Milky Way (photo below), according to the ancient Greek legend, is named so not accidentally.

Milk of the goddess Hera

Legend has it that Zeus had a son, Hercules, whom a mortal woman bore. Therefore, he could not be considered a god. At the same time, his wife, Hera, was breast-feeding a legitimate child. And her husband had a plan to make the little Hercules immortal. He had to drink Hera's breast milk while she was sleeping. When she awoke, the goddess saw that she was not feeding her child, she pushed the other's baby away. A stream of breast milk splashed and turned into the Milky Way.

According to scientists, the light tone is very different. There are galaxies that are similar in color, but they are completely different. First of all, high minds in the field of astronomical research were puzzled by the exact definition of the color of the native star system - the Milky Way. A team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, United States of America) started the work. And after serious research found the answer.

Spring snow at dawn

This is a very important research. Exclusively based on the color of 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. The fact that we are inside the star cluster, makes the Milky Way super-mysterious. The color of the object is perceived by us in a distorted way. And so it happened! Astronomers have established 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 Geoffrey Newman and Tim Licquia. It was they who deduced the shade of the Milky Way by averaging the data obtained from the observation of 1000 similar galaxies.

Evolution continues

What else is your color, the Milky Way? The cosmos, far and wide, gave birth to another comparison: "About halfway between the light from the old style of the incandescent lamp and the standard white spectrum on the TV screen." So what happens: gentle fluid milk does not matter? And what about the original name of the galaxy? We will not be categorical. Again, the clouds of gas and dust do not allow for a broad view. For an uncountable number of years this did not allow astronomers to get an idea of what the Milky Way looks like as a whole.

According to Newman, the problem lies also in the fact that it is very difficult to make an unambiguous description. This is the same as determining the general color of the Earth on the basis, for example, of the state of Pennsylvania. Indeed, the Milky Way color actually has a complex: a mixture of red hues from the core of the galaxy and the blue from its spiral arms. Scarlet corresponds to a part of the galaxy, where star formation is rare. Simultaneously, blue indicates the place where stars are still born. The Milky Way is between these two stages in a state of evolution.