The Mysterious Milky Way

M. Colleen Gino

Introduction
The center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a place of mystery. Veiled
in dense clouds of gas and dust, the Galactic Center remained an
enigma to astronomers for many decades after its location was
determined. In this report I will present a historical overview of the
methods used to determine the location of and distance to the
Galactic Center, and discuss the ways in which technological
advancements have given us a more detailed picture of the Galactic
Center. I will review the evidence for the existence of a supermassive
black hole at our galaxys core, and discuss a recently developed
method for the determination of an accurate distance to the Galactic
Center.

Historical Overview
One of the first known efforts to plot our position in the galaxy was
undertaken in the late 18
th
century by William Herschel. He incorrectly
assumed that by counting the number of stars in different regions of
the sky, he could easily identify the center of the galaxy by noting the
location of the highest concentration of stars. Since Herschel did not
find any region of the sky that had a higher concentration of stars than
any other region, he deduced that we must be in the center of the
galaxy.
Herschel was not the last astronomer to come to this conclusion. In
1906, J acobus Kapteyn began a similar project, to map the size and
the shape of the Milky Way Galaxy. The method he used was similar
to Herschels method. He surveyed 206 stars in specific areas of the
sky, analyzing their apparent brightness and proper motion. This
project took Kapteyn 16 years to complete. In 1922, the year of his
death, the results of his study were finally published: our galaxy was
30,000 light years across, 6000 light years thick, and the solar system
was smack in the middle of it. Kapteyns model of the Milky Way was
commonly accepted as accurate for many years.
Harlow Shapley began working at Mt. Wilson Observatory in 1914.
Using the recently completed 60-inch telescope, the largest telescope
in the world at that time, Shapley began observing globular clusters,
compact spheres consisting of thousands of stars. During his
research, he discovered a type a Cepheid variable, a star whose
relationship between the period of its variability and its intrinsic
luminosity allows the accurate measurement of its distance. Shapley
discovered these variable stars in a large percentage of the globular
clusters he observed. Aware of the period-luminosity relationship
discovered just a few years earlier by Henrietta Swann Leavitt, he set
out to determine the distances to all of the 93 clusters he observed.
His distance estimates to the globular clusters were shockingly large
ranging from 50,000 to 220,000 light years away. While Shapley had
previously accepted the Kapteyn model of the galaxy, he had to
believe his own data. Shapley calculated the new diameter for our
galaxy at 300,000 light years. More importantly, however, he
determined the Galactic Center to be located in the constellation of
Sagittarius, by mapping out the three dimensional distribution of the
clusters. Shapley published his "Big Galaxy" theory in 1918.
While Shapleys "Big Galaxy" theory was not widely accepted, his
placement of the Galactic Center in Sagittarius was. In 1927, J an Oort
published a paper on his research of the motion of stars in the vicinity
of the Sun. As he had predicted, these stars exhibited differential
rotation stars closer to the center of the galaxy traveled at higher
velocities than stars farther away from the center. By determining the
center of rotation of the stars, he pinpointed the center of the galaxy,
which was within 2 of Shapleys estimate. The distance to the
Galactic Center that Oort determined, however, was much less than
Shapleys estimate just 19,000 light years, a figure that fit the
Kapteyn model of the galaxy more closely than the "Big Galaxy"
model.
Why did Kapteyn, Shapley and Oort produce such disparate
estimates of the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and the location and
distance to its center? Because they did not have an important piece
of the puzzle the knowledge of interstellar extinction. Robert
Trumpler of Lick Observatory was researching globular clusters in
1930. He was determining the distances to the globular clusters by
deducing the absolute magnitude of individual stars in the cluster
based on their color and spectra. Trumpler then compared the
absolute magnitude to the apparent magnitude to calculate their
distance. His study once again placed the solar system at the center
of the galaxy, which had a diameter of 35,000 light years.
Trumpler then analyzed his data further. He compared the derived
distances to the angular size of the globular clusters on photographic
plates in order to determine the actual diameters of the clusters. The
results were not what he had expected. The data showed that the
more distant the cluster, the larger the diameter. Trumpler knew this
was highly unlikely, and deduced that there must be some absorbing
material throughout the galactic disk which was responsible for the
dimming of starlight in proportion to the stars distance form the Earth.
Trumpler made further calculations to test this theory, and found that if
the light was dimmed by one magnitude for every 5000 light years of
distance, the anomalous relationship between size and distance
disappeared. He also recognized that the majority of the obscuring
material must exist primarily in the galactic disk, as objects located
above and below the plane of the galaxy were dimmed by a lesser
amount.
Trumpler had discovered interstellar extinction, the dimming of
starlight as it passes through the gas and dust of the interstellar
medium. Without this knowledge, it was no wonder that Kapteyn and
Trumpler incorrectly determined that we were at the center of the
galaxy interstellar extinction places a limit on how far we can see
into space in any direction. With this knowledge in hand, astronomers
were on their way to determining a more accurate measurement of
the Milky Way Galaxy and the distance to the Galactic Center.

Penetrating the Veil
By the 1930s, the astronomical community had accepted the fact that
the Galactic Center was located in the constellation of Sagittarius, as
Shapley and Oort had determined. They also realized that the galactic
nucleus was hidden from view. Visible light from the Galactic Center
cannot penetrate the dense clouds of gas and dust surrounding the
central region, so it is completely obscured from view. This is because
the wavelength of visible light is comparable in size to the dust
particles, so the light is absorbed. Less than a trillionth of the light
from the stars at the center of the galaxy reaches us
(1)
. Therefore, the
early astronomers had no hope of ever seeing into the center of the
galaxy. No one could have guessed that the first look into the heart of
our galaxy would be made possible through radio waves.
Karl J ansky was an engineer employed by Bell Labs to study the
source of annoying static that plagued transatlantic telephone calls.
He constructed a radio receiver that was tuned to a frequency of 20.5
MHz (14.6m ) in an effort to detect the unwanted noise. By 1930
J ansky had identified three distinct sources of radio emission:
1. Local thunderstorms
2. Distant thunderstorms
3. "A steady noise of unknown origin"
(2)

After continued observations J ansky realized that the noise was not
terrestrial in origin, but emanated from a particular location in the sky
which rose four minutes earlier each day. Further analysis of the data
enabled him to pinpoint the location of the radio emission to be in the
constellation of Sagittarius, known to be the Galactic Center.
It is interesting to note that his choice of frequency for the
observations was a serendipitous one. It just so happens that the
Galactic Center emits copious amounts of radiation at 20 MHz. In
addition, he happened to be carrying out his observations during a
period of sunspot minimum, when the Sun was not very active. If he
had observed during a period of sunspot maximum, the radio
emission at 20 MHz would have been blocked by the Earths
ionosphere.
Although J ansky was not an astronomer, he was aware of the
importance of his discovery. His was the first detection of non-optical
radiation from space. Unfortunately, his discovery went practically
unnoticed, as most astronomers did not have the training to
appreciate or even to understand radio observations. Although J ansky
published his results in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio
Engineers in 1932, his findings were never published in an
astronomical journal.
While professional astronomers were not interested in pursuing
J anskys discovery, Grote Reber, a radio engineer and amateur
astronomer, was. Envisioning a new field of astronomy unfolding
before him, Reber constructed a 32-foot wire-mesh parabolic antenna
in his back yard. He began his observations in 1937, in his spare time.
Rebers first receiver was tuned to 3300 MHz (9cm ) in order to
detect thermal radiation. However, he had no success with this
frequency. He next tried 900 MHz (33cm ), and again was
unsuccessful. Finally, Reber tuned his receiver to a frequency of 160
MHz (1.9m ) and was successful at detecting non-thermal radio
emission in 1938, nearly a year after he began observing.
Reber published his first results in The Proceedings of the Institute of
Radio Engineers in 1940, just as J ansky had. Over the course of his
observations he created the first radio maps of the Milky Way,
revealing some detail in the galactic structure. He found the strongest
source of radiation to be from Sagittarius, with "hot spots" in the
constellations of Cygnus and Cassiopeia. With these results, Reber
broke into the astronomical community and published a paper in the
Astrophysical J ournal.
While these early radio telescopes were capable of detecting radio
emission, they did not have a high resolution and were therefore
incapable of discerning much detail. It would be more than a decade
before these instruments were improved upon, making it more popular
to observe in radio wavelengths.
Meanwhile, astronomers began to realize the value of observing in
infrared light, electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths slightly
longer than visible light. Seth Nicholson and Edison Petit carried out
the first systematic infrared observations of celestial objects in the
1920s. While the detectors were crude and plagued by interference,
observations in this portion of the electromagnetic spectrum showed
great promise. As previously mentioned, light from the Galactic Center
is absorbed by the intervening dust particles because the dust
particles are close to the same size as the wavelengths of visible light.
However, radiation with longer wavelengths, such as radio and
infrared, pass unimpeded through the clouds of gas and dust.
Therefore, astronomers expected that infrared observations of the
Milky Way Galaxy and its central portion would reveal details that
could not be observed in visible light.
In 1947 J oel Stebbins and A. E. Whitford conducted infrared
observations of the Galactic Center, and found a previously
undetected nucleus. These observations were confirmed by other
astronomers, and by the 1950s it was an accepted fact that the
central region of the galaxy had an extended nucleus visible only in
infrared light. This period marked the beginning of modern infrared
observing, due in large part to the development of special interference
filters and cryogenic cooling systems to improve the quality of the IR
detectors.
An intense radio source located in the Galactic Center was discovered
by J . Piddington and H. Minnett in 1951
(3)
. Because their radio data
agreed with the assumption that the nucleus of our galaxy should be
about 20 parsecs in diameter, the International Astronomical Union
defined this strong source as the official center of our galaxy, and in
1959 a galactic coordinate system was developed using this point as
its origin
(4)
.
In 1959 Frank Drake used the Green Bank 85-foot radio telescope to
observe at 22cm and 3.75cm simultaneously, resolving the Galactic
Center into four separate components, named Sagittarius A, B, B2
and C. Observing at these higher frequencies resulted in a fairly high
resolution, revealing the complexity of the nucleus. Two of the
components, resolved at 2.75cm, were small thermal sources, while
the other two sources were not thermal. Drake believed the emission
from the non-thermal sources to be attributed to synchrotron radiation,
electrons spiraling near the speed of light around magnetic field lines.
His data also indicated that the size of the region was about 20
parsecs in diameter, a figure that agreed with previous estimates. He
concluded that the brightest of the four sources within this 20 parsec
region was probably the Galactic Center
(5)
.
Eric Becklin and Gerry Neugebauer observed the Galactic Center in
1968 in the infrared and near-infrared at a high angular resolution.
These high resolution images of unprecedented detail revealed a
structure consisting of a dominant source, a point-like source centered
on the dominant source, an extended background and additional
discreet background sources
(6)
. It was discovered that in Sagittarius A
(as the whole structure is generically referred to), both radio and IR
radiation occurred at the same coordinates and were of similar sizes.
However, Becklin and Neugebauer found the infrared radiation to be
orders of magnitude greater than its optical or radio counterparts.

Evidence for a Massive Black Hole
The theory of the existence of a black hole at the center of our galaxy
was put forth by Martin Rees and Donald Lynden-Bell in 1971. They
believed that a black hole could be one possible explanation for the
tremendous amount of energy that had been detected coming from
the Galactic Center. Rees and Bell predicted that if the radiation was
intense emission resulting from gasses spiraling into a black hole, it
would be detectable as a compact synchrotron radio source.
J ust three years later, Bruce Balick and Robert Brown detected such
a compact source in the inner one parsec core of the galactic nucleus
(7)
. They found the location of this extremely energetic source, Sgr A*
(Sagittarius A star), to coincide with the dynamical center of the
galaxy. Balick and Brown had detected the first evidence that a
massive black hole resided in the heart of our galaxy.
In 1981 Mike Watson led a team that observed the Galactic Center
with the orbiting Einstein Observatory in search of X-ray emission
(8)
.
They detected diffuse X-ray emission and 12 distinct point sources
within 20 arcminutes of the galactic nucleus, Sgr A West. A number of
subsequent X-ray observations between 1980 to 1990 revealed a
number of transient sources in the region as well.
The detection of X-ray is an important aspect in the identification of
black holes. The material falling in toward a black hole forms an
accretion disk. As the matter in the accretion disk spirals in toward the
black hole, the gravitational energy gets converted into heat, causing
the disk material to heat up and emit X-rays. However, when the
Galactic Center was imaged in hard X-rays at high resolution with the
XRT instrument on Spacelab2 in 1987, Sgr A* appeared much fainter
than was expected for a massive black hole. This low emission of X-
rays remains unexplained.
Charles Townes and Reinhard Genzel conducted a series of
observations in the late 1980s using infrared telescopes to search for
evidence of a black hole at the center of our galaxy. They were able to
track the movement of giant clouds of gas in the innermost three light
years of the Galactic Center. The gas clouds closest to the center
moved faster than those farther away, suggesting that the clouds
were being gravitationally pulled by a massive black hole. While
Genzel felt that this was concrete evidence for the existence of a
black hole, the astronomical community in general did not.
Genzel joined forces with Andreas Eckart, and continued the search
for a central black hole. Instead of tracking the motion of gas clouds
around the Galactic Center, they focused their efforts on tracking the
movement of individual stars. Beginning in 1990, Genzel and Eckart
used a technique called speckle imaging (a large number of very short
exposures are reconstructed into high resolution image) in the near-
infrared in an effort to resolve individual stars near the central portion
of the galaxy. The resulting data were so heavily processed, however,
that although they detected motion in the stars that enabled them to
calculate a mass for the central object in the galaxy, their results were
not taken too seriously.
Eckart and Genzel continued to develop their technique. By 1999 they
had determined the proper motion of more than 40 stars in the central
portion of the galaxy
(9)
. Using Newtons laws of gravitation, they were
able to estimate the total mass of Sgr A* to be at least 2.6 million solar
masses and contained in a relatively small region, clearly indicating
the presence of a black hole.
Further evidence for the existence of a massive black hole in the
Galactic Center has been introduced by Mark Reid. In 1999 he used
the VLBA to conduct radio observations to measure the motion of the
Sun around the Galactic Center, and the motion of Sgr A* using
distant quasars as reference points
(10)
. If Sgr A* was home to a black
hole, it would remain still compared to the Sun moving in its orbit. Two
years of measurements show that this is exactly the case Sgr A*
remains virtually motionless, while the Sun is moving at 500
kilometers per hour.
The most conclusive evidence to date has come from a team of
astronomers led by Andrea Ghez
(11)
. They have made observations
in the near-infrared with the 10-meter Keck telescope on Mauna Kea,
which is equipped with an adaptive optics system, a complex optical
system capable of canceling out the image-blurring effects of the
atmosphere, thereby producing extremely high-resolution images.
These images have allowed a very precise determination to be made
of the proper motion of the stars, which are moving at velocities up to
1400 km/s, and therefore a precise determination of the mass of Sgr
A* in which the stars are in orbit around. The most recent calculations
give the mass Sgr A* as 2.6 million solar masses. Since the object
must fit within the orbits of the fast-moving stars, an area with a
diameter of about 16 light days, the objects density is so high that it
simply must be a black hole.

Distance to the Center of the Galaxy
Since the days of Herschel, astronomers have attempted to determine
the size of our galaxy and the distance to its center. This is an
important measurement, as many of the other measured parameters
of galactic objects such as distance, mass and luminosity, are directly
related to R
o
. The exact distance is still a point of debate, ranging from
8.0 to 8.5 kpc. But this situation may soon come to an end.
Samir Salim and Andrew Gould of Ohio State University have
developed a method that will allow a direct and extremely accurate
measurement of the distance to the Galactic Center. They plan to
solve for the Keplerian orbit of individual stars in orbit around the
black hole
(12)
. A Keplerian orbit is a closed ellipse that occurs when
an object orbits a point mass, such as a planet orbiting the Sun or a
binary star system. In general, the orbits of stars in a galaxy are not
Keplerian, since they dont orbit around a point mass. In the case of
the stars around the black hole in our galaxy however, they are clearly
orbiting around a point mass, so must be in a Keplerian orbit.
According to Salim and Gould, the Keplerian orbit can be solved from
radial velocity and proper motion measurements of the precision
currently obtained by Ghez. They claim that this method, which has
been commonly used to measure the masses and distances to binary
stars for decades, will allow them to determine the distance to the
Galactic Center to an accuracy within 4% as early as the year 2002.
One advantage of this system is that it is not a statistical method, and
does not suffer from systematic errors. Each star observed will lead to
a value of R
o
independently, with the accuracy dependent only upon
the precision of the measurements of proper motion and radial
velocity. Salim and Gould predict they can determine a value of R
o
to
an accuracy of 1-5% after 15 years of observations, and to an
accuracy of 0.5-1% after 30 years of observations. If they are correct,
we will very soon have the most accurate measurement of the
distance to the Galactic Center than ever before.

Conclusion
For centuries, astronomers have been striving to learn more about the
Milky Way Galaxy we call home, and to determine our place in it. The
existence of an exotic beast at the heart of our galaxy, a
supermassive black hole, has almost certainly been determined.
Advancements in technology have allowed astronomers to break
through many barriers in order to obtain an ever closer look at the
Galactic Center, and will no doubt continue to do so.




References:
(1) Verschur, G.L, 1987, The Invisible Universe Revealed: The Story
of Radio Astronomy, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1987
(2), (4) Malphrus, B.K., 1996, The History of Radio Astronomy and the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Kreiger Publishing Company
(3) Piddington, J .H., Minnett, 1951, Australian J ournal of Scientific
Research 4A, p.459
(5) National Radio Astronomy Observatory Annual Report, J uly 1,
1959
(6) Becklin, E.E., Neugebauer, G., 1968, Infrared Observations of the
Galactic Center, Astrophysical J ournal 151, p 145-161
(7) Balick, B., Brown, R.L., 1974, Intense Sub-arcsecond Structure in
the Galactic Center, Astrophysical J ournal 194, p 265
(8) Watson, M., et al, 1981, An X-ray Study of the Galactic Center,
Astrophysical J ournal, Part 1, vol. 250, p142-154
(9) Eckart, A., Genzel, R., 1999, The Galactic Center Black Hole, The
Physics and Chemistry of the Interstellar Medium, Proceedings of the
3rd Cologne-Zermatt Symposium
(10) Reid, M. et al, 1999, The Proper Motion of Sagittarius A*, First
VLBA Results, The Astrophysical J ournal, Volume 524, Issue 2, p.
816-823
(11) Ghez, A.M. et al, 2001, Towards Complete Stellar Orbits Around
the Galaxy's Central Black Hole: The First Acceleration
Measurements, Black Holes in Binaries and Galactic Nuclei.
Proceedings of the ESO Workshop held at Garching, Germany
(12) Salim, S., Gould, A., Sgr A* "Visual Binaries" A Direct
Measurement of the Galactocentric Distance, submitted to
Astrophysical J ournal 2001
http://www.mpifr-
bonn.mpg.de/gcnews/gcnews/Vol.9/samir@astronomy.ohio-
state.edu_ap9812292.abs.shtml



Copyright 2001 C. Gino