26.1 The discovery of galaxies

Learning objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the discoveries that confirmed the existence of galaxies that lie far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy
• Explain why galaxies used to be called nebulae and why we don’t include them in that category any more

Growing up at a time when the Hubble Space Telescope orbits above our heads and giant telescopes are springing up on the great mountaintops of the world, you may be surprised to learn that we were not sure about the existence of other galaxies for a very long time. The very idea that other galaxies exist used to be controversial. Even into the 1920s, many astronomers thought the Milky Way encompassed all that exists in the universe. The evidence found in 1924 that meant our Galaxy is not alone was one of the great scientific discoveries of the twentieth century.

It was not that scientists weren’t asking questions. They questioned the composition and structure of the universe as early as the eighteenth century. However, with the telescopes available in earlier centuries, galaxies looked like small fuzzy patches of light that were difficult to distinguish from the star clusters and gas-and-dust clouds that are part of our own Galaxy. All objects that were not sharp points of light were given the same name, nebulae , the Latin word for “clouds.” Because their precise shapes were often hard to make out and no techniques had yet been devised for measuring their distances, the nature of the nebulae was the subject of much debate.

As early as the eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) suggested that some of the nebulae might be distant systems of stars (other Milky Ways), but the evidence to support this suggestion was beyond the capabilities of the telescopes of that time.

Other galaxies

By the early twentieth century, some nebulae had been correctly identified as star clusters, and others (such as the Orion Nebula) as gaseous nebulae. Most nebulae, however, looked faint and indistinct, even with the best telescopes, and their distances remained unknown. (For more on how such nebulae are named, by the way, see the feature box on Naming the Nebulae in the chapter on interstellar matter.) If these nebulae were nearby, with distances comparable to those of observable stars, they were most likely clouds of gas or groups of stars within our Galaxy. If, on the other hand, they were remote, far beyond the edge of the Galaxy, they could be other star systems containing billions of stars.

To determine what the nebulae are, astronomers had to find a way of measuring the distances to at least some of them. When the 2.5-meter (100-inch) telescope on Mount Wilson in Southern California went into operation, astronomers finally had the large telescope they needed to settle the controversy.

Working with the 2.5-meter telescope, Edwin Hubble was able to resolve individual stars in several of the brighter spiral-shaped nebulae, including M31, the great spiral in Andromeda ( [link] ). Among these stars, he discovered some faint variable stars that—when he analyzed their light curves—turned out to be cepheids. Here were reliable indicators that Hubble could use to measure the distances to the nebulae using the technique pioneered by Henrietta Leavitt (see the chapter on Celestial Distances ). After painstaking work, he estimated that the Andromeda galaxy was about 900,000 light-years away from us. At that enormous distance, it had to be a separate galaxy of stars located well outside the boundaries of the Milky Way. Today, we know the Andromeda galaxy is actually slightly more than twice as distant as Hubble’s first estimate, but his conclusion about its true nature remains unchanged.