28.1 Observations of distant galaxies  (Page 3/7)

In addition to distance and look-back time, studies of the Doppler shifts of a galaxy’s spectral lines can tell us how fast the galaxy is rotating and hence how massive it is (as explained in Galaxies ). Detailed analysis of such lines can also indicate the types of stars that inhabit a galaxy and whether it contains large amounts of interstellar matter.

Unfortunately, many galaxies are so faint that collecting enough light to produce a detailed spectrum is currently impossible. Astronomers thus have to use a much rougher guide to estimate what kinds of stars inhabit the faintest galaxies—their overall colors. Look again at [link] and notice that some of the galaxies are very blue and others are reddish-orange. Now remember that hot, luminous blue stars are very massive and have lifetimes of only a few million years. If we see a galaxy where blue colors dominate, we know that it must have many hot, luminous blue stars, and that star formation must have taken place in the few million years before the light left the galaxy. In a yellow or red galaxy, on the other hand, the young, luminous blue stars that surely were made in the galaxy’s early bursts of star formation must have died already; it must contain mostly old yellow and red stars that last a long time in their main-sequence stages and thus typically formed billions of years before the light that we now see was emitted.

Another important clue to the nature of a galaxy is its shape. Spiral galaxies can be distinguished from elliptical galaxies by shape. Observations show that spiral galaxies contain young stars and large amounts of interstellar matter, while elliptical galaxies have mostly old stars and very little or no star formation. Elliptical galaxies turned most of their interstellar matter into stars many billions of years ago, while star formation has continued until the present day in spiral galaxies.

If we can count the number of galaxies of each type during each epoch of the universe, it will help us understand how the pace of star formation changes with time. As we will see later in this chapter, galaxies in the distant universe—that is, young galaxies—look very different from the older galaxies that we see nearby in the present-day universe.

The first generation of stars

In addition to looking at the most distant galaxies we can find, astronomers look at the oldest stars (what we might call the fossil record) of our own Galaxy to probe what happened in the early universe. Since stars are the source of nearly all the light emitted by galaxies, we can learn a lot about the evolution of galaxies by studying the stars within them. What we find is that nearly all galaxies contain at least some very old stars. For example, our own Galaxy contains globular clusters with stars that are at least 13 billion years old, and some may be even older than that. Therefore, if we count the age of the Milky Way as the age of its oldest constituents, the Milky Way must have been born at least 13 billion years ago.