UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL LANCASHIRE

Price - £22.00 plus £3.50 P&P

ISBN 978-1-909-755-33-8, 242 pp.

Author: Victor P. Debattista and the UCLan Astronomy Distance Learning Team

Published 2025, and available from 10th February 2025

Detailed Description

The realisation that our Milky Way galaxy is just one of billions of galaxies is rightly considered one of the great scientific revolutions, comparable to the Copernicus revolution. This textbook covers our understanding of the Milky Way’s structure, properties and formation. These notes, originally drafted by the Astronomy Distance Learning Team, have been updated multiple times over the past decade, and now take into account the latest advances made possible by the data that have come from the Gaia satellite.

This textbook covers the physical processes and observational methods that are necessary for understanding the Milky Way across a range of scales. The study of atomic gas, which opened the first observational window outside visible wavelengths, shows us that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, with the Sun located some way out from the centre. A more detailed study of the morphology reveals that the Milky Way is in fact a barred spiral, and we discuss some of the consequences of this. An exploration of the nature of the dust explains why the Sun was for so long thought to be the centre of the Milky Way, and also offers insights into the processes necessary for star formation. Star formation then helps us understand star clusters, both open and the older globular clusters. The globular clusters are distributed within a roughly spherical stellar halo, which is composed of the debris from the early formation of the Milky Way, including small dwarf galaxies that is has cannibalised. On even larger scales, the Milky Way is embedded in a dark matter halo that accounts for the vast majority of its mass. We review a range of experiments that show dark matter must be some form of particle that has not yet been discovered. We also show that alternative theories of gravity are not easily able to explain observational data, meaning dark matter needs to be viewed as more than just a convenient fiction that explains the motions of gas and stars. We end by returning to the centre of the Milky Way and understanding its nucleus and the supermassive black hole at its centre.

If you have any queries, please contact: Danielle Bewsher, 01772 893271, [email protected]