Marvel for a moment at the Milky Way’s night-sky spectacle—and the scientific revolutions it has sparked | Analysis
The universe is filled with immense structures of mind-crushing proportions. They wield energies that dwarf our most fevered dreams.Case in point: find yourself a dark spot over the coming week or two—where you can see stars down to magnitude 4.0 or 5.0 at a time when the moon rises late—and look up.
That’s a fanciful interpretation, sure. But once you see it for yourself, you’ll appreciate why ancient people mythologized the heavenly scene. The most famous of these, perhaps, is the Greek myth in which Hera pushes away the baby Heracles from her bosom, and her breast milk spills from horizon to horizon. The Romans called this feature in the sky the via lactea , which is the origin of the modern name. The Greeks called it the galaktikós kyklos , which is the source for the term “galaxy.
The Milky Way’s true shape—implied in its riverlike path across the sky—offers an important clue as well. If our galaxy were a huge spherical structure of stars with Earth near its center, its glow would be everywhere we look. But the fact that it appeared relatively flat suggested to 18th-century astronomers that the Milky Way was actually a disklike assemblage of stars that was more like a pancake than a sphere.
In the 1920s astronomer Jacobus Kapteyn took this a step further. He also measured stellar velocity and brightness to try to make a more accurate map. In the end, his work mostly agreed with the Herschels’ results.
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