Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave2042
Fascinating. I wish I had more time to study this kind of thing.
You mention the 'thinness on the ground' of material on our own galaxy. I have always found it an amusing paradox that, in a sense, our galaxy (as opposed to the individual stars in it) is the hardest to observe, simply because we are in the middle of it.
It's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong, O knowledgeable ones) that much work is still underway trying to confirm even fairly high-level structure of the Milky Way, such as the shapes of the arms.
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G'day Dave,
If you need more time, perhaps do what I did, which is to be semi-retired, relatively early in life, so as to be able to spend at least 4 hours (optimistically, 6 hours) per day thinking about galaxies.
Yeah, a lot of people in the professional astronomical community have gone off chasing distant galaxies (especially primeval ones), and other exotica such as the intergalactic medium, colliding galaxies, and Active Galactic Nuclei......and so sometimes it is surprising how few workers are actually left to work on more "homely" topics such as the local galaxies. I have been recently looking into OB associations, which are an
extremely important aspect of our own Galaxy, and the literature about them since 1999 is extremely small; I have about 15 papers downloaded onto my computer, and that's about it!!
As another example, the reasonably accurate characterization of the nearby Groups of Galaxies had to wait till the late 1990s before there started to be meaningful amounts of work.
Regarding the question of the characterization of our Galaxy's spiral structure, I could do no better than to paraphrase a section of a paper by Robert A. Benjamin in the symposium "The Galaxy Disk in Cosmological Context";
Benjamin states that the IAU Symposium No. 106 on the Milky Way, which was held in 1983, marked
the end of the study of our Galaxy's spiral structure as a long-term and sustained effort by astronomers.
This may have been partly because of a trend towards a greater fraction of
extra-galactic work, as can be seen in the greater relative numbers of papers published on external galaxies.
But it was also because - to a great degree - all of the work done never resulted in a really plausible spiral structure that most people could agree on. There is a diagram of Milky Way spiral structure in Bok and Bok's "The Milky Way"(5th Edition) which was published in 1981, and the small handful of papers published on our Galaxy's spiral structure since 2004 do not improve on this diagram much!!!
cheers, robert
P.S.
I just happened to download some ~10 scientific papers relating to spiral structure of our own galaxy, all of them from the last 8 years or so. There isn't much else published in this period.
I might put some of the recent plots of spiral structure in this thread , if I "get a round tuit"