Hubble Reveals the First Visual Evidence of Changes in the Milky Way

Hubble Reveals the First Visual Evidence of How the Milky Way Has Changed

What a difference 11 billion years makes, as can be seen in these two comparative views of our Milky Way galaxy. The top view shows how our galaxy looks today; the bottom view, how it appeared in the remote past. This photo illustration is based on a Hubble Space Telescope survey of evolving Milky Way-type galaxies.
[Top View] — The current night sky is dominated by the white glow of myriad middle-aged stars along the lane of the Milky Way. Interstellar “pollution” from thick dust lanes can be seen threading through the long band of stars. They are interspersed with a few pinkish emission nebulae from ongoing star formation. Thousands of stars appear as pinpoints of light throughout the sky.
[Bottom View] — This is an imaginary view of our young Milky Way as it may have appeared 11 billion years ago, as seen from the surface of a hypothetical planet. The night sky looks markedly different than the view today. The Milky Way’s disk and central bulge of stars are smaller and dimmer because the galaxy is in an early phase of construction. The heavens are ablaze with a firestorm of new star formation, seen in the pinkish nebulae glowing from stars still wrapped inside their natal cocoons. The handful of stars visible in the night sky are blue and bright because they are young. The graphic of today’s Milky Way was based on an all-sky image from Axel Mellinger and the Finkbeiner all-sky H-alpha survey. The illustration of the early Milky Way was constructed from the all-sky image from Axel Mellinger and Robert Gendler’s image of the M33 galaxy. Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI)

Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, a newly published study reveals the first visual evidence of how the Milky Way has evolved over the last 11 billion years.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revealed the first visual evidence of how our home galaxy, the Milky Way, assembled itself into the majestic pinwheel of stars we see today.

Astronomers used Hubble’s deep-sky surveys to study the evolution of 400 galaxies similar to the Milky Way and noted their appearance at various stages of development over a time span of 11 billion years. Judging from images of these far-flung galaxies, they found the Milky Way likely began as a faint, blue, low-mass object containing lots of gas. Gas is the fuel for star birth and the blue color is an indicator of rapid star formation.

They also found the Milky Way probably was a flat disk with a bulge in the middle, both of which grew simultaneously into the majestic spiral seen today. The sun and Earth reside in the disk and the bulge is both full of older stars and home to a supermassive black hole that probably grew along with the galaxy.

“For the first time, we have direct images of what the Milky Way looked like in the past,” said study co-leader Pieter G. van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Conn. “Of course, we can’t see the Milky Way itself in the past. We selected galaxies billions of light-years away that will evolve into galaxies like the Milky Way. By tracing the Milky Way’s siblings, we find that our galaxy built up 90 percent of its stars between 11 billion and 7 billion years ago, which is something that has not been measured directly before.”

The Hubble telescope’s superior resolving power, with which it can see extremely fine details, allowed the researchers to study how the structure of the Milky Way changed over time. At the peak of star formation, when the universe was about 4 billion years old, the Milky Way-like galaxies were pumping out about 15 stars a year. By comparison, the Milky Way today is creating only one star a year.

“You can see that these galaxies are fluffy and spread out,” said study co-leader Shannon Patel of Leiden University in The Netherlands. “There is no evidence of a bulge without a disk, around which the disk formed later.” Team member Erica Nelson, of Yale University, added: “These galaxies show us the whole Milky Way grew at the same time, unlike more massive elliptical galaxies, in which the central bulge forms first.”

To identify the far-flung galaxies and study them in detail, the research team used three of the largest Hubble programs, the 3D-HST survey, the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey, and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey. These surveys combined spectroscopy with visible and near-infrared imaging by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys.

The research team’s analysis involved measuring the distances and sizes of the galaxies. The astronomers calculated the mass of each galaxy from its brightness and colors. They selected the galaxies in their census from a catalog they compiled of more than 100,000 galaxies. The survey galaxies are consistent with computer models, which show at early stages, a majority of the bulges of spiral galaxies were built up at the same time as their corresponding disks.

“In these observations, we’re capturing most of the evolution of the Milky Way,” explained team member Joel Leja of Yale University. “These deep surveys allow us to see the smaller galaxies. In previous observations, we could only see the most luminous galaxies in the distant past, and now we can look at more normal galaxies. Hubble gives us the shapes and colors of these spirals as well as their distances from Earth. We also can measure the rates at which each part of the galaxies grew. All of this is difficult to do from the ground.”

The team’s results were published July 10 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. A second paper appears in the November 11 online edition of The Astrophysical Journal.

Reference: “The Assembly of Milky Way-like Galaxies Since z~2.5” by Pieter G. van Dokkum, Joel Leja, Erica June Nelson, Shannon Patel, Rosalind E. Skelton, Ivelina Momcheva, Gabriel Brammer, Katherine E. Whitaker, Britt Lundgren, Mattia Fumagalli, Charlie Conroy, Natascha Förster Schreiber, Marijn Franx, Mariska Kriek, Ivo Labbé, Danilo Marchesini, Hans-Walter Rix, Arjen van der Wel and Stijn Wuyts, 26 June 2013, The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/771/2/L35
arXiv:1304.2391

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