Milky Way Research Paper

The Formation of the Milky Way

By Nathanael Roybal; Geological Sciences

ABSTRACT

The Milky way is a band of light that has millions of stars that are combined together and that spans 100,000 light years away. They say the Milky Way is about 14 billion years old. How they figured this out by measuring the ages of each star. They have found trace elements of hydrogen and helium so we know that the Milky Way was formed and early in the history. Another good way to find the age of the stars in the Milky Way is measuring thorium because it has a half-life of 14 billions years after 14 billion the thorium should decay in another element. The formation of the Milky way started by observations concerning chemical abundances in stars and gas using

The formation and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy come, on one side, from observations concerning chemical abundances in stars and gas and, on the other side, from the continuous improvement of stellar nucleosynthesis calculations (Chiappini et al, 2001). There are some important quantities relevant to the chemical evolution of the Milky Way, such as the star formation rate (SFR), the initial mass function (IMF), and gas is still poorly constrained. However, a good model of chemical evolution can allow us to impose constraints on such quantities (Chiappini et al, 2001). In particular, a good chemical evolution model should be able to reproduce observables larger in number than the number of adopted free parameters. Among the observables, there are in the center with the consequent formation of the bulge. During the second episode, a much slower infall of primordial gas gives rise to the disk with the gas accumulating faster in the inner than in the outer regions. (Chiappini et al, 2001). In this scenario, the formation of the halo and disk are almost completely dissociated although some halo gas falls into the disk. This mechanism for disk formation is known as “inside-out II scenario, and it is quite successful in reproducing the main features of the Milky Way (CMG97) as well as of external galaxies especially concerning abundance gradients” (Chiappini et al, 2001).

A scientist has estimated the galaxy covers the mass of all the stars, black holes, gas clouds, dust, dark matter and other unidentified flying objects in the Milky Way (Radford, 2016 ). The previous rough ballpark figure was around a trillion solar masses. The standard measure for big astronomical objects Scientists began by measuring the Earth From two centuries ago, and astronomers will find the distance to the sun. that can also use Newton’s equations, they found the mass for the sun and it is 330,000 times the mass of the Earth (Radford, 2016 ). There is one big problem is that to arrive at a good estimate, astronomers have to be sure of the speeds of very distant objects. It’s important that we take the movement and position of the sun into account when we measure the motions and positions of other objects in the Milky Way. “The mass of a galaxy’s dark matter halo plays a large role in the formation and evolution of that galaxy. Certain properties such as star formation rates and the size of supermassive black holes are known to depend on the mass of the galaxy,” (Radford, 2016